Mitsubishi X-800
Thirty-two tracks of digital audio on one-inch tape, sold to the studios that could afford to argue about formats.
Overview
The X-800 is a 32-track digital multitrack recorder, and it arrived at the exact moment the professional audio world split into two camps over how digital multitrack ought to work. Mitsubishi's pitch — and the surviving period advertising is nothing if not a pitch — was that the X-800's 32-channel standard on one-inch tape was the format for "World Class Studios," while the competing DASH format could only manage 24 channels at the time. The ad copy names United Western, Lion Share, Fantasy, Nippon-Columbia, Toshiba-EMI and Soundstudio N as users, and it does not bother being subtle about the implication: 24 channels, in Mitsubishi's framing, was for the "larger but ordinary" rooms. Whether or not one accepts the marketing, the channel-count argument was real, and it was the axis the whole format war turned on.
What makes the X-800 interesting in hindsight is how thoroughly it was a machine of workarounds and interfaces. It was not a self-contained digital island. Recording Engineer (August 1985, p.85) reported that The Burbank Studios had interfaced an X-800 in one of its dubbing rooms, synchronizing it with a BTX (later Cipher Digital) Shadow Softtouch so the machine could chase film pulse information from a master film controller — effectively behaving like a conventional 35mm film dubber, except that it was supplying 32 digital audio tracks instead of one optical stripe. TBS built its own autolocator to integrate machine control into the console. Fantasy Studios in San Francisco was doing the same kind of work for film scoring. This is the texture of early digital: brilliant machines that only became useful once somebody at the facility wrote the glue.
The synchronization story is where the X-800 earns its keep. Both the 32-track and the companion X-80 two-track were supplied with a parallel interface for external control of all transport and electronic functions, and the design leaned on a software program stored in ROM that governed tape handling — specifically to prevent an external synchronizer from thrashing the tape around the transport by commanding the servo carelessly. Anyone who has watched a synchronizer misbehave on an analog machine knows why that ROM mattered. The X-800 also carried an additional SMPTE timecode track, plus two further tracks for analog recording and two digital tracks for automation data or other real-time information, which meant you did not have to burn a valuable audio track on code. That last detail is the sort of thing that sounds mundane until you are 20 tracks into a session and need one more.
The format argument continued in print. Mitsubishi's advertising claimed the one-inch 32-channel standard could be expanded to double-density 64-channel, and asserted that the error-correction scheme had been developed to support a much larger recording density than the format was then using — with the film head technology already in hand to do it "anytime." The same copy pointed at DASH's proposed 48-channel double density as a promise with no delivery date attached. It is worth reading that as what it is: a manufacturer arguing its own case in a trade magazine, in a war it eventually lost. But the technical claim — that the X-800's architecture had headroom built in — is consistent with how the machine was actually deployed.
Sony's own 48-channel DASH machine, the PCM-3348, was announced at the AES convention in November and reported as upwardly and downwardly compatible with the PCM-3324 and 3324A, with 96 kHz oversampled input and output electronics and a suggested retail price reported at $240,000. That figure is useful context for the X-800's market position: this was a class of equipment where a single recorder cost more than most studios' entire outboard rack, and where the format you chose determined which other facilities could exchange tapes with you. Compatibility was not a convenience. It was the whole business.
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