Tascam M-2516
A compact 8-buss in-line console that doubled its own input count on paper. Home-studio recordists felt like they'd bought a real desk.
Overview
The M-2516 is the sixteen-input member of Tascam's M-2500 Series, a line of compact 8-buss recording consoles built around a distributed in-line monitor scheme. Tascam's own advertising of the period aimed at the "input hungry." The M2516 and its 24-input sibling the M2524 each carried as many tape returns as input channels, so the in-line monitor configuration could effectively double the usable input count to 32 and 48 respectively. That doubling is the whole reason the desk exists. Between the mic/line inputs and the tape returns, an owner gets a lot of routing combinations, the kind of flexibility that ordinarily lived on consoles costing far more.
Each channel on the M-2516 carries an in-line stereo monitor, 4 auxiliary sends, 3-band/2-sweep equalization, pre-fade listen, mute, and assignment switches for groups 1 through 8. The master section provides 2 stereo and 2 mono effects returns, both fully assignable. The advertising tallied 4 effects sends with 2 mono and 2 stereo effect returns for additional mixing flexibility. The mic jacks are balanced and phantom powered, so condensers can go straight in without an outboard preamp. Eight-buss recording is standard, and the desk supports automated muting via MIDI commands. Tascam billed the MIDI Mute and snapshot scene memory features as "strictly professional."
Tascam's own marketing presented the M-2500 Series as the perfect blend of performance, capacity, and mixing versatility with speed, comfort, and convenience, task-oriented production consoles for the recordist and electronic musician. That's advertising, and it should be read as such. But EQ Magazine (June 1991, p.78) got one in for review and came away impressed by the accuracy of the amplification and monitoring, noting that the M-2516 temporarily replaced a console with a much higher list price — an easy way to judge its sonic performance against a tougher benchmark. That's a meaningful data point: a reviewer deliberately slotting a budget-oriented 16-input desk into a slot held by a pricier board and finding it held up.
A 16-input, 8-buss in-line console with phantom power, four aux sends, and MIDI muting.
The honest caveats come from the desk's own design. The 3-band/2-sweep EQ is flexible for the price but not a surgical tool. A console built around MIDI mute and snapshot memory is only as useful as the MIDI rig feeding it. The automation is scene-based muting, not moving-fader automation. Condition varies enormously between surviving examples; a desk pulled from a working room is a different proposition from one that's been sitting in a garage.
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