Tascam M3700 (1990)
A fully automated console for under fifteen grand - the machine that put moving-fader mixing within reach of project studios.
Overview
Fourteen thousand dollars was the number. Tascam's own 1990 advertising for the M-3700 Series leaned hard on an under-$14,000 suggested retail price. The pitch was blunt: if you'd rather mix than mess around with a rack of outboard boxes, this console was aimed at you. Tascam also billed it as the only automated console offering both snapshot automation and dynamic automation. Snapshot automation recalls stored levels and switch positions as "scenes." Dynamic automation locks those same levels and switch positions to real-time locations. For a studio getting by on MIDI muting or a patched-in outboard automation rig, that combination was the whole argument.
The M3700 came in two frame sizes, 24- or 32-channel, and the automation was built in rather than bolted on. An onboard computer handles VCA fader level, channel mute, auxiliary mute, monitor mute, and EQ on/off. The data saves to an on-board floppy drive - no external computer, no monitor, no mouse, no extra cabling. A built-in SMPTE timecode generator and reader with a write/update mode locks the whole thing to tape or video, and MIDI in, out, and thru ports connect it to whatever else was in the room. The console also carries eight group buses, four fully assignable effects return switches, and six aux sends. Tascam's marketing called it "a compact, familiar-looking system," and that was deliberate. The automation was supposed to disappear into a normal mixing workflow, not dominate it.
What the automation remembers is worth spelling out. Fader moves and EQ bypass status are stored for the main channel, and mutes are recalled for both main and monitor inputs. That means a mix can be recalled and then tweaked channel by channel without disturbing the rest. That is the practical payoff of dynamic automation on a console at this price, and it is the reason the M3700 turns up in the credits of working rooms rather than just in brochures. Mix (January 1993, p.119), reviewing the console, set it against the two usual categories of automated desk - the unaffordable fantasy and the limited MIDI-muting compromise - and positioned the M3700 as the one that broke the pattern, noting SMPTE (or MIDI) timecode-driven automation on a console priced from under $13,500.
The period press treated the price as the headline. EQ magazine, surveying mixers a buyer could take home, put it plainly: if the budget stretched to automation, the M3700 - at $12,999 for 24 inputs and $14,999 for 32 - was the only contender below twenty grand. The automation, not the sonics, is what sold the M3700. The sonics, by contemporary account, were competent enough not to get in the way.
By the mid-nineties the M3700 had become a package-deal staple. Sound on Sound (June 1995, p.91) advertised the fully automated console in both frame sizes alongside Tascam's DA88, promising savings of "literally THOUSANDS off RRP." The desk had settled into the role of affordable automation workhorse, the one a dealer bundled with a digital multitrack to move both. It was also the console in real rooms. EQ (August 1992, p.57) profiled Howie Tee's Brooklyn studio, Howie's Cribb, with an M3700 as the centerpiece console alongside a Tascam MSR-16 and a pair of Tascam DA-30 DAT decks. Howie Tee had Chubb Rock, Color Me Badd, and Heavy D and the Boyz on his credits.
Where the M3700 gets interesting for a collector is the same place it got interesting in 1990: the automation is the whole machine, and the automation is what ages. The floppy drive, the onboard computer, the SMPTE generator — these are the parts that fail or grow awkward, and they are also the parts that make the console worth owning rather than a generic analog desk of the same vintage. The audio path itself is the conventional part; the recall is the reason to seek one out. Buyers should expect to verify that the automation system boots, that the disk drive reads and writes, and that the timecode section locks, because a non-automated M3700 is a very different proposition from a working one. The 32-channel frame carries a premium over the 24, and both turn up on the used market far below the original five-figure asking price — which, given what the console does, is the enduring appeal of the thing. It was the first automated console many engineers could actually afford, and it still is.
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