Tascam 480B
A half-inch eight-track that British studios kept flipping secondhand for years, and the paperwork proves it.
Overview
The Tascam 480B is an eight-track recorder running half-inch tape. Dealers in the mid-1980s called it part of Tascam's Commercial Series. That's all that's firmly documented. The archive's fact sheet on this machine is effectively empty: no production years, no head specs, no transport details, no original MSRP. So everything below comes from period dealer listings, not a full technical dossier. The listings still tell you something useful. Working studios bought this machine, used it, and resold it at a steady clip through the back half of the 1980s.
Start with the prices, because they're the most concrete thing available. In a June 1986 clearance ad, a London dealer offered an ex-demo 480B for £2,495 - a single unit, one only. The same shop's April 1986 listing carried the identical figure for a new 480B. By October 1988, a dealer price list shows the 480B at £2,995 alongside the 42NB two-track and the MS-16 sixteen-track. That puts it in the middle of Tascam's commercial range: above the quarter-inch two-tracks, well below the one-inch sixteen-track. It was pitched at project rooms and small commercial facilities that needed eight tracks of half-inch without stepping up to the MS-16's price bracket.
The secondhand market adds to this. A 1989 used-equipment listing shows a 480B with dbx, in a CS-607 console, described as "all immaculate," at £2,595. That's slightly above what dealers had been asking for new units three years earlier. Another 1986 ad lists an ex-demo 480B at £2,495, the same as the new price, which suggests these machines held their value stubbornly. Collectors note that a recorder holding near-new pricing three years after its debut usually means demand outpaced supply, or that the units were well cared for in professional rooms.
The period record on reception is thin. DB-Magazine (July 1988, p.76) published a studio equipment list that included a Tascam 480B alongside a Studer A820 and a Revox PR99II. Nobody was mistaking it for a Studer, but working rooms kept it on the roster next to one.
What the archive cannot confirm: tape speeds, head configuration, noise reduction as a standard feature, synchronization provisions, dimensions, weight, or the years the model was in production. The dbx mention appears only in a dealer listing describing one specific used unit, so it may have been an option or an add-on. Anyone considering a purchase should verify head wear, capstan condition, and whether the unit includes the dbx carding before committing. The dealer listings show dbx-equipped examples existed, but not whether every 480B shipped that way.
The 480B occupies an interesting spot in Tascam's catalog: an eight-track half-inch Commercial Series machine that British dealers stocked, sold, and resold with confidence for at least three years. The paper trail is all dealer ads and one magazine equipment list, but that trail is consistent — new at £2,495 in 1986, listed at £2,995 in 1988, still fetching £2,595 used in 1989. For a recorder with no surviving spec sheet in this archive, that's a surprisingly clear picture of a machine that earned its keep.
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