Teac 85-16B
A one-inch sixteen-track Tascam workhorse that turns up in period dealer ads bundled with a Model 15 console and a rack of dbx - the complete small-studio package, sold as a unit.
Overview
The paper trail on the 85-16B is almost entirely commercial. The deck shows up in British pro-audio dealers' ads of the early 1980s as a package item, not a lone box. Music Lab's June 1982 spread in Studio Sound (June 1982, p.16) lists the "16 track 1" Tascam 85/16 inc. dbx" paired with a Tascam Model 15 24x8 console, 16-track monitoring and an auto-locator for £9,950. That is a turnkey sixteen-track front end for a project room that couldn't yet justify a two-inch 24-track. The 85-16B was the tape deck at the center of that package.
The format is the headline and the reason these decks still circulate: sixteen tracks on one-inch tape. AEA's February 1984 ad in Mix pitches the machine directly against the Fostex B-16 half-inch sixteen-tracker, offering "TEAC 85-16B 1" 16TK" as the step up for a studio "starting at 1/2" 8-TK or upgrading to 2" 24-TK." The 85-16B sits between the half-inch sixteen-track machines and the two-inch professional decks. It was sold to people who wanted sixteen tracks of real multitrack without paying two-inch prices.
Noise reduction came with the package. The dealer ads consistently pair the deck with dbx. Music Lab's package deal explicitly includes it, and a later Mix classified (March 1989) offers a "TEAC 8516B w/dbx & autolocators" alongside a Model 15 board as a complete mint-condition sixteen-track studio. The recurring "with dbx" phrasing across the period advertising shows that buyers expected the deck to ship into a dbx-based workflow, and that the noise-reduction rack counted as part of the machine's value rather than optional outboard.
The record does not give a hard specification sheet. No frequency response, wow-and-flutter, dimensions, weight, or head configuration surfaces in the available documentation. What survives is the market evidence: the deck was sold new through British and American pro-audio dealers in the early-to-mid 1980s, it was routinely bundled with Tascam's Model 15 mixer and dbx, and it appears in the pages of Studio Sound and Mix as a known, stocked item rather than a curiosity. Anyone quoting detailed specs for an 85-16B is working from something other than this archive's sources.
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