Roland VS-1680 (1998)
A tabletop studio with 16 tracks, a 26-channel automated mixer, and a 320×240 display that made editing feel like actual editing.
Overview
Roland's own advertising was blunt: "It's huge. Make room." That was the pitch for the VS-1680, the flagship of the VS-Series Digital Studio Workstations. It was a complete 16-track, 24-bit recording, editing, mixing and effects system in a compact tabletop workstation. The headline numbers were real. Sixteen tracks of hard-disk recording with 256 virtual tracks, eight simultaneous record, a 26-channel automated digital mixer, and MT Pro 24-bit recording mode for headroom and dynamic range that the spec sheet promised and the ad copy repeated.
The display is what separated the 1680 from everything around it. A large backlit 320×240 dot graphic LCD showed level meters, playlists, EQ curves, effect settings and waveforms all at once. The waveform editing is what collectors still bring up first. EQ Magazine (March 1999, p.13) walked through the software upgrades Roland pushed out for the machine. Period coverage of the VS line was consistent on one point: the 1680 was the only unit in the range that provided true waveform editing, which made jobs like excising lip smacks and breath pops almost trivial. The VS-880 could technically be coaxed into similar work, but it was never designed for it.
The connectivity was serious for a tabletop box. It had ten audio inputs: two balanced XLR-type inputs with phantom power, six balanced 1/4" inputs, and a stereo digital input on optical or coaxial. Those fed twelve audio outputs (eight RCA, two stereo digital, plus phones). Conversion ran through 20-bit A/D and D/A converters. The EZ Routing system let owners build and save mixer templates for recording, mixing, bouncing and other routing chores. There's also a well-known undocumented shortcut - hold the Status key for any track and every routing parameter for that track appears, ready to be edited. Users who found it report it made the machine dramatically faster to work with than the menu path suggested.
Effects came in two parts. The VS-1680 shipped with two optional 24-bit stereo effects processors, the VS8F-2 boards. With both installed you got up to eight channels of independent effects. The advertising line was "4 stereo or 8 mono effects processors," and that asterisk does real work, because the boards were not standard. A stock unit without them is a very different proposition from a loaded one, so check what's actually inside before valuing a used example.
The software kept the machine alive well past launch. Mix Magazine (November 1999, p.33) noted that Roland bundled Emagic's Logic Audio VS, a special VS version of the sequencing and audio production software, with the VS-1680 and VS-880EX, along with Liquid Audio for publishing CD-quality audio over the internet. Free downloads from Roland's site added 18-track capability (mixdown of the 16 tracks onto two more), COSM speaker modeling, and a mastering tool kit built around a split-frequency compressor. Direct CD burning came via the optional VS-CDR-16 recorder, which handled both mixdown to CD and data backup. Because those were multisession discs, owners could cut several mixes to the same disc and audition comps in different listening environments.
Sound on Sound (1998, p.155) listed the machine at £2199 in the UK and flagged 16 tracks of 24-bit digital audio and the large, clear display among its strengths. The same issue's pros-and-cons treatment is worth reading in full before buying, because the cons column is where the reality of a 1998 hard-disk studio lives.
For collectors and home recordists today, the VS-1680 occupies an interesting spot: it's a self-contained studio with genuine editing depth, no computer required, and a workflow that a certain kind of user still prefers to a DAW. The caveats are the usual ones for the format. The hard drive is old, the VS8F-2 effect boards are optional and often missing, and the CD recorder is a separate optional unit that many examples no longer include. The machine's own advertising promised it would loom large in any room — and it does, physically and in the sense that it wants to be the center of your setup rather than a piece of it. Owners who've kept theirs running tend to describe it as the box that taught them to edit properly, which is about the best thing you can say for a late-'90s tabletop workstation.
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