Neve 8068 MK II
A console that shows up in classified ads rarely, and never cheap.
Overview
The Neve 8068 MK II is a large-format analog recording console, and it mostly exists as a rumor until one gets listed. The documentation that survives comes almost entirely from the secondhand market - broker ads, classified pages and dealer listings. That says something about who owned these and how they moved between studios.
The most detailed description is a 1989 classified listing in Mix-Magazine (March 1989, p.166). It describes a 32-channel 8068 MK II with VCA faders, eight VCA group masters, four echo returns, and a TTL patch bay on DL connectors, listed at $75,000 or best offer. That lines up with what Neve's own advertising was pushing around the same period: updated 8058/8068 MK II consoles with NECAM computer mixing, VCA grouping, and automation readiness, positioned alongside the new 40-input/32-track 8078.
The draw was automation combined with the traditional Neve signal path. The VCA fader system wasn't bolted onto a passive design - the automation was integrated at the channel level. Neve's advertising from the period describes the system sampling control voltages across six submaster faders, 40 input faders, and four line control faders in sequence. Each one was digitized through a 12-bit A/D converter, and the system processed 44 words per console scan at 1 ms intervals. The fader taper was scaled by a plug-in exponential memory board using 12 ROMs, so the dB-per-inch of fader travel could be adjusted. That was a side benefit of doing the gain control digitally while keeping the audio path analog.
For engineers who came up on these desks, the appeal wasn't the automation specs. It was the sound. Neve's own marketing leaned hard on this - "You know our consoles are the best in the world," one ad read, "used by leading recording studios, studios not willing to compromise on sound or reliability." That's advertising copy, not an independent verdict. These consoles did keep commanding six figures on the used market decades after they were built.
The 8068 MK II turns up in broker listings with a regularity that borders on ritual. db Engineering, a Boston-area broker, ran the same classified ad across multiple issues of Recording-Engineer offering a "NEVE 8068 MK-II w/Necam" at $95,000 - the same price point as an SSL 4040E/G, and more than a Studer A800 at $40,000. By the early 2000s, Mix-Magazine dealer listings (July 2003, p.162; December 2002, p.196; February 2003, p.161) still had 8068 MK II consoles moving through the vintage market alongside Neve VR72s, 8128s, and 8058 MK IIs.
Very little of the documentation is technical, and most of it is commercial. There's no surviving spec sheet in the source material - no frequency response figures, no channel count variants documented beyond the 32-input configuration, no production dates. What exists is a paper trail of transactions: what they sold for, who brokered them, what other gear they were listed next to.
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