Tascam Model 32
A quarter-inch two-track that did its work as the mixdown deck at the end of a home studio's chain.
Overview
Look at the equipment lists of working studios and the Model 32 turns up. It isn't the centerpiece of the rig. It's the final stage, the machine that takes the finished mix off the console and puts it on quarter-inch tape.
The two-track designation tells you the role. The Model 32 is a 2-track quarter-inch machine, in a market full of eight-track and four-track recorders. It's a mixdown deck, and period documentation shows it. A Canadian studio profile describes a band mixing down onto a Tascam Model 32 half-track (Canadian Musician, 1990s). A dealer's package deal paired the Model 32 with a Model 38 half-inch eight-track and a Model 35 8x4x8 console, with the two-track sitting at the end of the chain to catch the finished product. It was built to be the last thing in the signal path, not the first.
The Model 32 was a professional tool at a working price. One dealer listed the two-track at $2,299.00, part of Tascam's Series 30 recorders, which the same catalog describes as designed for production needs at an economical price. It wasn't a consumer toy in rack ears. It was sold in the same dealer catalogs as the Model 34B four-track ($2,899.00) and the BR-20, and it was expected to hold its own in rooms where the console cost more than the tape machine.
The Series 30 family, according to dealer listings, came in two- and four-track versions - the Model 32 being the two-track and the Model 34B the four-track. Both were quarter-inch format machines running 7-1/2 and 15ips with NAB equalization. The standard feature set included a servo-controlled capstan motor with ±12% pitch control, motion sensing with dynamic reel braking, 10-1/2" reel capacity, return-to-zero, and dump/edit capability. RCA inputs and outputs were at -10dBV. The pitch control and the dump/edit function are working-deck features, the kind you want when you're doing mixdown work and need the machine to behave predictably.
The Model 32's quarter-inch tape differs from the Model 38's half-inch format in that dealer package, and the two machines do different jobs. The Model 38 captures eight tracks. The Model 32 captures two. That makes it the machine for the final stereo mix, where the creative decisions are already made. The 7-1/2 and 15ips speeds give a choice between longer running time and higher fidelity, and the NAB equalization keeps it compatible with the rest of a working studio's tape library.
The Model 32 is not the machine most people seek out first. The eight-track recorders get the attention, and its value is tied to the health of the rest of a studio rather than to its own reputation. For a period-correct mixdown chain, with a Model 38 or similar multitrack feeding a console, feeding a Model 32, it fits the slot, and the dealer listings and studio inventories show it was used that way when it was new.
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