Tascam 85-16B

A one-inch sixteen-track that gave working studios fifteen tracks of audio and only sacrificed one to SMPTE - and did it with dbx built right in.

Overview

The 85-16B is the machine Tascam built when it decided the small studio deserved a real multitrack rather than a scaled-up portastudio. It records sixteen tracks on one-inch tape, and it carries dbx noise reduction onboard instead of in a rack of outboard boxes. Tascam's own advertising, which ran in the trade press in early 1983, made the pitch bluntly. The 85-16B has the high motor torque and 30-pulse-per-second tach rate needed to lock up fast and stay locked with the editing systems of the day, and it will park exactly where a controller tells it to. The company also leaned hard on the crosstalk control. It was good enough that only one track had to be surrendered to SMPTE timecode, leaving fifteen tracks fully usable for audio. No guard-band track wasted keeping code out of the mix.

That claim is the main selling point. A sixteen-track deck that effectively gives you fifteen channels is a different proposition from one that quietly costs you a second track to bleed. Tascam's ad copy promised "everything from the wheels to the reels" - the console, the built-in dbx, and full-function record controls - without paying for extras. Marketing copy is not a review, so read it as a sales argument rather than a verdict. The feature set it describes is consistent with how the deck was positioned in the trade press.

The period coverage bears that out. Studio Sound (July 1983, p.119) described the 85-16B as "deservedly successful," and paired it in a dealer package with Allen & Heath's 1616 mixer. It called the combination a professional-performance recording team that would surprise even a sceptical ear, and the affordable multitrack package for the musician or studio with creative resources but a not-so-unlimited budget. That framing was repeated across several months of Studio Sound advertising through 1983. The deck was for the project studio and the mid-tier room that wanted sixteen tracks on one-inch tape without stepping up to a two-inch machine and its tape costs.

The transport is servo-controlled, and the tape format is one-inch, sixteen-track. One-inch sixteen-track is a narrower track width than two-inch sixteen, which is why crosstalk control and noise reduction matter so much here. The 85-16B was sold both bare and as a package. Studio Sound (March 1984, p.98) listed a complete new-studio bundle built around the 85-16B with a Tascam M16 mixer and sixteen channels of dbx noise reduction, which is a fair picture of how these decks left dealers.

Studios put them to work. Trade "studio update" columns from the period record a Tascam 85-16B with auto-locator going into Recording Associates Studios in Charleston, South Carolina, feeding a Tascam Model 16 console. They also record a 16-track room at Richard Thorton Sound Services in Russellville, Arkansas, running an 85-16B with six-memory auto-cue into a modified console, and a second room at Horizon Recording in Pittman, New Jersey, built around an 85-16B and an M-520 console. The auto-locator and auto-cue options show up repeatedly, which suggests owners actually sprang for them.

By the late 1980s the deck had moved into the used columns. A 1988 classified offered a Tascam 85-16B sixteen-track for sale, and a 1990 dealer listing priced a used 85-16B with dbx and auto-locator at $4,000 alongside Otari MX-5050 machines and a Fostex E-22. That $4,000 is a used-dealer asking price from 1990, not an original MSRP, so treat it as a snapshot of the market rather than a benchmark. It does show the deck held enough value seven years after its introduction to be worth listing next to Otari's two-tracks.

What It Is and Who It Was For

Strip away the marketing and the 85-16B is a one-inch sixteen-track reel-to-reel with servo-controlled transport, onboard dbx noise reduction, and full-function record controls, offered with auto-locator and auto-cue options that studios clearly used. The SMPTE arrangement - one track for code, fifteen for audio, thanks to tight crosstalk control - is what separated it from cheaper sixteen-track solutions for anyone syncing to picture or to a sequencer.

The pairing with Allen & Heath's 1616 desk was pushed through Music Lab's advertising in Studio Sound across the spring and summer of 1983. A 16-8-2 mixer with phantom power, switched-frequency EQ, and three auxiliaries is a serious small-format desk. Bundling it with an 85-16B was aimed at the studio stepping up from eight tracks that needed both halves at once.

Ownership Notes

The 85-16B is a professional-format machine, and that shapes what ownership looks like. One-inch tape is the consumable, and it isn't cheap relative to quarter-inch or cassette formats. The deck's value proposition was that it was more affordable than two-inch sixteen-track while still being a real multitrack. With dbx onboard, the noise-reduction decision is made for you. That simplifies the signal path, but it also ties the machine's sound to that circuitry.

Auto-locator and auto-cue variants appear throughout the period studio listings, so a used example's value depends heavily on whether those options are present and working. The transport's servo control and the torque figures Tascam advertised were aimed at fast, repeatable lockup. That either works or doesn't on a forty-year-old deck.

The sources leave a lot out. There is no confirmed production run, no original list price, no documented frequency response, wow-and-flutter figure, or weight in the material available here, and no service history to speak of. Anyone shopping one should check the mechanical condition of the transport and the state of the dbx boards first, because those determine whether the machine is a tool or a project.