Tascam ATR-24
A two-inch twenty-four-track machine that turns up in dealer stock lists more often than in spec sheets.
Overview
The ATR-24 survives in the historical record mostly as a line item. It is a two-inch, twenty-four-track reel-to-reel that shows up again and again in the second-hand and ex-demo columns of the British studio trade press. The surviving documentation does make the format clear: a two-inch tape path carrying twenty-four tracks, typically listed with a remote and autolocator. That pairing matters in practice. On a twenty-four-track, a remote and a locate system were not throwaway accessories. Without them you walked back and forth to the transport all day.
Dealer listings from the early 1990s show where the ATR-24 sat. In Studio Sound (October 1992, p.80) (February 1990), the same dealer was listing a new ATR-24 at £24,500. By mid-1992, ex-demo examples with remote and autolocate were being offered as "price on application", which is the polite trade-press way of saying the number was negotiable. The machine was expensive enough to be a serious capital purchase, and resale values moved with the fortunes of the studios that bought them.
How the ATR-24 sounds, how its transport behaves, and what its electronics are built around are not documented in the material available here, so none of that gets guessed at. What can be said is where it sat in Tascam's professional line. The ATR prefix set the company's serious multitracks apart from the MSR and MS series, and the ATR-24's two-inch format put it at the top in tape width and track count. Dealers treated it as a flagship-class item, pricing it against Studer and Otari rather than against Tascam's own narrower-format machines.
The ex-demo listings also show how these machines were sold. A shop advertising an ATR-24 as "ex demo, VGC" with remote and autolocate was selling a machine that had been set up and demonstrated rather than gigged to death. On a twenty-four-track, that counts for more than cosmetics, since head wear and transport hours are what matter. Buyers in the early 1990s were weighing a new ATR-24 against a used Studer A80 or Otari, and dealers kept listing the Tascam alongside those names.
eBay Listings
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.