Tascam Model 30
A small eight-by-four mixer that spent the early Eighties being rented by the week and bundled into budget multitrack packages. Its model number has been causing research headaches ever since.
Overview
The Model 30 was Tascam's compact eight-input, four-bus mixer. The period advertising puts it at the budget end of the range. Studio-Sound (March 1983, p.6) grouped the Model 30 and the Model 35 as a pair of "improved 8×4 mixers, both built to good standards of construction," listed among small Tascam systems pitched at the cost-conscious buyer - the M244 Portastudio, the 34 recorder, and similar entry-level rigs. The same pairing runs again in Studio-Sound (May 1983, p.6). This was never a flagship desk. It was the console you bought for a first multitrack setup when you needed eight channels in and four buses out without spending studio money.
The hire lists show the Model 30 working for a living. British dry-hire advertisements of the period list it by the week, three days, and day. A Tascam Model 30 8×4 rented at £40 per week, £25 for three days, or £10 daily in the December 1982 Studio-Sound rate card, with the same figures carried through the February and March 1983 issues. That makes it working stock, the kind of console a small studio or location outfit kept around because it was cheap to own and cheap to rent out. Dealers bundled it too. One 1982 Studio-Sound clearance listing paired an eight-track Tascam 38 with the Model 30 as a package deal.
The trade press reputation for construction was modest but positive. "Built to good standards of construction" is the phrase the advertising leaned on, and for a budget console of this class it mostly meant the thing wouldn't fall apart in a hire rack. Treat that as marketing, not an independent verdict - no measured review of the Model 30's audio performance turned up in the available period sources. The desk was sold and rented as a reliable utility piece, not a sonically distinguished one.
The biggest hazard for anyone researching or buying a Model 30 today is the name. The model number is shared with at least two unrelated products from the same era. Gold Line sold a "Model 30" digital real-time third-octave spectrum analyzer, a top-of-the-line professional unit with thirty switched-capacitive filters, built-in pink noise, and a price of $2,150 to $2,395 depending on the listing, advertised in the mid-Eighties trade press. Sound Workshop built a "Model 30" console board of a very different scale, named in a 1982 Recording-Engineer studio equipment listing. The TEAC Model 2A also turns up alongside the Tascam Model 30 in the same hire rate cards, which is an easy source of confusion when scanning old ads. None of these are the Tascam eight-by-four mixer. Anyone chasing a service manual, a schematic, or spare parts needs to confirm they have the Tascam 8×4 first, because the search results will happily hand back a spectrum analyzer or a different console.
Documentation on the Model 30 is thin. The available period material establishes what it was, roughly when it was sold, and how it was positioned and rented. It doesn't give a full spec sheet, a production run, or an original list price for the mixer itself. Buyers should work from the unit in hand and verify channel count, bus configuration, and connector types against the actual hardware, rather than trusting a manual found under the same model number.
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