Studer 24/A820
A two-inch multitrack that turns up in the classifieds of the people who actually ran studios.
Overview
The Studer 24/A820 shows up in the back pages of the trade magazines, and not often. Period listings show a machine that working studios bought, used hard, and traded among themselves. Ads for this kind of gear describe it by hours and head condition first, because that's what a buyer cares about.
A recurring classified ad from a French broker, AudioCare, ran in Studio Sound in the late 1990s and into 2000, and the 24/A820 appears in it again and again. The listings describe "2 Studer 24/A820/SR/Locat/sync" - a 24-track A820 fitted with the SR noise-reduction option, a Locat synchronizer, and sync capability, sold as a matched pair. The same ad also lists a lone "8/A820/3500 hrs/remo," so the A820 family spanned track counts, and buyers tracked hours the way you'd check odometer mileage. The "remo" tag on that 8-track suggests a remote, but the listings don't spell it out.
The classifieds make it plain that the 24/A820 was a studio workhorse with a resale market, not a museum piece. AudioCare's ad ran month after month across Studio Sound (October 1999, p.95), and the A820 keeps appearing alongside A800 mk3s and A827s - the same broker's stock of big Studer multitracks. The 24/A820 was listed in the same breath as those machines, and priced by the hour.
Read the listings for what they are: advertising, not independent review. AudioCare was a dealer, and the descriptions are the dealer's own. The ads do confirm that the 24-track A820 was a real, traded commodity in professional rooms. They also suggest the SR, Locat, and sync options were commonly fitted to the 24-track version, since the broker specifically called them out on the pairs he was moving.
The period record here is thin on hard numbers. There's no independent measurement, no published price, no frequency-response figure in the material that survives. What's documented is the market presence: a 24-track Studer multitrack that studios bought in pairs, fitted with noise reduction and synchronization, and sold on with their hours disclosed.
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