Studer 24/A800
A multitrack that studios measured themselves against, and the classifieds kept showing it.
Overview
The Studer 24/A800 is the 24-track configuration of Studer's A800 multitrack tape recorder. The back pages of the trade press show where it stood. In the late 1990s and into 2000, a French broker called Audiocare ran the same standing advertisement in issue after issue of Studio-Sound. Alongside pairs of A820s and a lone A827, there was almost always "1 Studer 24/A800 mk3/new heads." That recurring line - Studio-Sound (October 1999, p.95) among the placements - shows a machine that stayed in demand as a used asset long after the format wars had moved on. A dealer who keeps listing a specific model month in and month out does it because people keep asking for it.
The record is narrower than the legend. The 24/A800 is identified as a Studer multitrack of the A800 family, and the classified listings reference an "mk3" version sold with new heads. That tells a buyer two things. First, the A800 went through at least a third revision by the time these machines were circulating on the secondhand market. Second, head condition was the headline selling point, as it is for any professional tape machine, since the heads wear with every hour of tape. A listing that leads with "new heads" is aimed at someone who knows what a worn head stack costs to replace.
The A800 sits in the Studer catalog alongside the A820 and A827, and the classifieds show the family relationships. The same Audiocare ad that offered the 24/A800 mk3 also offered "24/A820/SR/Locat/sync" and a "24/A827/4000 hrs/AL," and even an "8/A820." The "24/" prefix in these listings appears to denote the track count of the configuration being sold, which is why the model is written here as 24/A800, a 24-track A800. That reading holds across every appearance of the machine in the source material. The documentation for this entry is thin, though. The surviving evidence is essentially dealer classifieds, not a Studer spec sheet, owner's manual, or period lab review.
The fact base for this page does not include the A800's tape width, transport speeds, equalization standards, track layout, or original list price. Those are the numbers an engineer actually wants, and inventing them, or borrowing them from a sibling Studer model, would be worse than leaving them out. What the market record shows is that professional brokers treated the 24/A800 mk3 as a marquee item, listed first or near-first among Studer multitracks, and priced as serious gear rather than a curiosity. Anyone chasing one today is chasing a specific revision with documented head life. The classifieds of 1999-2000 show the model was still moving through serious rooms at the turn of the millennium.
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