Crushingly, my famed Fostex 250 is not doing so hot. Considering that it's over 25 years old, and has seen umpteen hours of use in the last 3 years, this is less than surprising. As luck would have it, however, I responded to a craigslist ad for a Tascam 464. The 464 is the upgraded version of the classic 424 (not to be confused with the 424 MKIII - the 464 is still better). Arguably the best tabletop 4 track Tascam ever made (the 234 is cooler, but rackmount). A good condition 424 goes for $100-$175 on that eeebay, but no one knows about the 464. I paid $65 bucks for this beast and am damn pleased about it. The transport is super-stable and the pre's sound great. I'm of course still running everything through the board, and the only drawback to this unit is that it doesn't feature direct tape inputs (which you could probably hack into by looking at the insert returns on the first two tracks and duplicating the wiring on 3 and 4 - it's probably a lot of work though). I've dumped the tracks off the Minidisc and am ready to record some vocals, so we'll see how it turns out. So far I'm immensely pleased with this purchase.
As for the Fostex, I'm going to try and either swap the pinch roller off a newer broken tape deck, or pay $35 for a reconditioned pinch roller from Terry's.
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