I was just at Goodwill in Hillsboro dropping off some stuff... checked inside and saw an unusual item. It looked like an 8 track mixer board with XLR inputs but had an attached 7" reel to reel recorder (under a plastic cover). Made by Tascam, it was 99 bucks, would something like this be of use to somebody starting an internet "radio" station?

Few radio stations need eight tracks of analog recording, but if they did, you could do far worse. If that is a good working Tascam 388, it would definitely be worth more than a hundred bucks. It is essentially an integrated recording studio. Quite a number of independent albums have been tracked with that same machine. They are still very popular today and tape stock is readily available.

Went back and looked again... the manual sez 388 "studio 8"... looks like the recorder uses 1/2" tape and the heads have 8 segments on each head. I don't think that I have seen 1/2" tape on 7" reels before (except for old 7" VTRs)... cool looking device, and very heavy, perhaps nearly 100 lbs.

For some reason I thought this would be a thread about laughing at ugly shirts.

A used 8-track ADAT machine is easily more than $100, and the ADAT decks don't include microphone preamps or a mixing console! I hope that somebody puts together a really nice home studio with this puppy!!