Studer A800

Name: Studer A800
Brand: Studer

The multitrack that made microprocessor control a studio expectation, and stayed in the best rooms long after tape stopped being the point.

Overview

Studer built the A800 when multitrack recording was still the center of the studio. A lot of first-line facilities bought it when they needed a 24-track that would not embarrass them. The company's own advertising in DB-Magazine (July 1982, p.29) says it plainly: the A800 was designed for video post-production, and it quickly found its way into the world's best recording studios instead. It was built for one job and got drafted into another.

In Recording-Engineer (December 1980, p.7) and Mix-Magazine (May 1981, p.9), Studer sold the usual things: Swiss precision, "inimitable quality," and a system engineered to complement the competent professional. The claim that counts is buried in that copy. The A800 was the first machine to use microprocessor control of all critical transport functions. Before it, tape transport logic was relays and mechanical interlocks. After it, every serious multitrack had a microprocessor in the deck.

Recording-Engineer (February 1979, p.63) specified the transport with 14-inch reel capability, half-horsepower spooling motors, and microprocessor-controlled deck functions for what the ad described as the smoothest, fastest tape motion you've ever seen. It also carried new phase-compensated amplifiers and a self-sync facility. Self-sync let a 24-track act as its own overdub machine, with no second deck and no sync box.

The classifieds show the A800's market position as clearly as the advertising does. A broker listing in Recording-Engineer priced a Studer A800 at $45,000, next to an MCI JH24 at $20,000 and a Studer A80 at $20,000. Another dealer ad in the same publication offered a Studer A800 24-track at $40,000, bracketed by an Otari MTR-90II at $30,000 and a Studer A80 MKII at $26,000. A third listing quoted two Studer A800 MKIII machines at $40,000-$44,000. These are broker asking prices, not auction results. Still, the pattern holds: the A800 carried roughly double the value of the MCI and Otari machines it competed against, and kept it for years.

By the mid-1980s the A800 was still turning up in the trade press as a used machine. Studio-Sound (February 1984, p.92) listed a Studer A800 24-track with autolocate and remote at £28,000 with 3,000 hours on it, and a second identical machine at £28,500 with 2,000 hours. The lower-hours machine cost more, which is the only real variable between the two. The same publication was running A800 listings four years after the machine's introduction.

The surviving record gives no measured performance. The archive's sources hold no lab test, no frequency response sweep, no wow-and-flutter figure and no signal-to-noise measurement for the A800. The period material is advertising and classifieds, not reviews. Anyone quoting a specific distortion figure or headroom number for the A800 is working from something other than the documented record, and the Archive would rather say so than invent one.

Studer's own copy states the A800's lineage. A Recording-Engineer advertisement (undated in the archive's chunk, but consistent with the company's early-1980s voice) describes the A820-24 as "entirely Studer-engineered and manufactured to Studer specifications," and notes that for four decades, in the tradition of the Studer A80 and the A800, that's the way it's been. So the A800 sits between the A80 that preceded it and the A820 that followed. It is the middle link in Studer's professional multitrack chain, and the one that brought microprocessor transport control to the line.

In the studio inventories that survive, the A800 shows up repeatedly as the multitrack of record. A Recording-Engineer facility listing pairs a Studer A800 with an Otari MTR 90-24 as the two multitracks in a room that also ran a Solid State Logic 4056 G Series console. Another listing from the same publication names a Studer A800 Mark 1 in a room with a modified Neve Class A 8058 console and a 1-inch 2-track tube Studer on loan. These are not hobbyist setups.

Today the A800 is heavy, expensive to maintain, and dependent on a supply of heads and transport parts that is not getting larger. The archive has no documented failure modes, no service history and no parts-availability information for the A800, so any specific warning about what breaks would be invented. The record does show a machine that carried a $40,000-$45,000 asking price in the early 1980s, bought by studios that were not buying casually.