BR1600 etc discontinued???

[AndyR]

Has anyone else found rumours of "discontinued" on the BR1600??? 

I found this last night:

http://www.roland.co.uk/products/productdetails.aspx?p=574

(I was looking for where to buy another one, as one of my possible options, and I can get new ones at the moment here in the UK, but I found that link as well)

SteveB's noticed it:

Sh*t! It looks as though they're ALL discontinued: 1200, 900, 600, the whole dang caboodle. They've just unloaded Cakewalk...wonder what's going on?? 

[AndyR]

Yep, Steve, shitteroo!

What is going on? I don't feel highly confident that they're replacing it with a similar product, either...

I've now got the "do I buy another one?" problem suddenly thrust upon me...

At £950ish (I've seen one as low as £875), I don't think so... And no way am I buying a second hand one...

I've been thinking for some time that I have to look into Reaper. A lot of folk I respect, including our esteemed Sir Flash of Harry, regard it as the dogs wotsits...

Looks like I need to accelerate that investigation to see if it's a go-er for me... (so that I still have the option to bag another BR1600 if looks like I can't stand to be without one).

Having said that, after my scare last night, my BR1600 now seems to be even healthier than it was before!

[Geir]

I really hope the will come with a 16-track recorder soon. Now the only two listed under "Home » Products » Guitar & BOSS » Recording" is "MICRO BR BR-80" & "BR-800"   ...... and I have both .... I really would love to have 8 inputs for the next MET tho ....  

[AndyR]

Geir, does the BR-800 have balanced XLR inputs? (With 48v phantom power?)

It didn't look big enough for it when I saw one in a shop window!!

And weren't you struggling with lack of editing or something ages ago, have they upgraded that yet?

I'm scared that any replacement for the BR1600 is going to go down the same sort of route as the 800, and that I'm going to lose something that's an integral part of my workflow at the moment.

I have to admit that going back to a DAW (with the knowledge and, er, "restraint" I've learnt on the MBR and BR1600) is starting to sound more attractive, anyway.

Mind you, if the BR-800 has the input capabilities and decent "transfer to PC" speed... mebbe that's the direction I should go in... in conjunction with Reaper or something similar... A very portable tracking device, and something to mix the 200 parts on!!

[Geir]

Geir, does the BR-800 have balanced XLR inputs? (With 48v phantom power?)

It's only got one with phantom power. 

It didn't look big enough for it when I saw one in a shop window!!

And weren't you struggling with lack of editing or something ages ago, have they upgraded that yet?

They did and editing is now like the mbr. 

I'm scared that any replacement for the BR1600 is going to go down the same sort of route as the 800, and that I'm going to lose something that's an integral part of my workflow at the moment.

I share your worries. If I were to buy a 16 track stand alone recorder, it would have to be STAND-ALONE ! That is I should be able to do everything on the BR. 

I have to admit that going back to a DAW (with the knowledge and, er, "restraint" I've learnt on the MBR and BR1600) is starting to sound more attractive, anyway.

Mind you, if the BR-800 has the input capabilities and decent "transfer to PC" speed... mebbe that's the direction I should go in... in conjunction with Reaper or something similar... A very portable tracking device, and something to mix the 200 parts on!!

I am really happy with the 800, tho I would have loved to have phantom power on all 4 inputs

[Speed Demon]

To aid a musician friend, I did a memory dump from his BR1600CD to my PC. It seemed to take forever to complete and the files were not in the WAV format I had expected to see. This forced me to spend money purchasing a program that would convert those files to WAV format. Something I could work with. I took away five stars for this debacle. This happened in summer of last year and I'm still not finished converting hundreds of music files so they can be edited. Bad idea, to my way of thinking. Cancelled any plans for buying one.  

[AndyR]

Sounds like you used BACKUP instead of EXPORT!

BACKUP just copies the file system over to your computer. You'd have to use an extraction program then. Much like the MBR.

EXPORT can only output track data. And the only formats it can export to are... WAV or AIFF (some apple format, I believe).

It kind annoyed me that it didn't support MP3 at first. I got over it, though.

But... you're absolutely darn right about the time thing!!! Bluddy hell! I only did it once (USB 1.0)

It's then I realised how the CD drive might be of some use to me!

Much faster using CDs to get audio data on/off the thing, and it supports R/W CDs - I bought a box of them 3 years ago, I've only opened the wrapping on two of them.


I've read that some people think it's the file conversion to WAV that takes all the time, but it's not... Writing to CD has to do the same conversion, and it's 10, 20 times faster than connecting the thing to the computer.

If they brought out a new BR1600, exactly the same except the CD drive is gone and the USB upgraded to a decent version, no other changes at all... Then I mebbe would spring £950 for a new one

[64Guitars]

Roland never seems to announce the end-of-life of any of their products. And the various Roland sites never seem to agree on which models are current and which are discontinued. I think they like to include old models on their website to imply that they're current until all stock is sold. Then they move it to the "Discontinued" or "Legacy" part of the website. The trouble is, different international divisions will sell out of old stock at different times. So the Roland site of one country may consider a product discontinued while another country's site considers the same product current. For example, I believe they stopped making the original Micro BR a long time ago, yet the Roland US site still lists it as a current product. That suggests to me that they still have old stock that they're trying to get rid of.

http://www.rolandus.com/products/category/494

The Roland sites of most other countries (U.K., Japan, etc.) list only the BR-80 and BR-800 as their current multitrack recorders. All previous models are listed as discontinued.

Discontinued Recording Products - Roland UK: http://www.roland.co.uk/products/productlist.aspx?c=282

I believe that the BR-80 and BR-800 are the only Roland multitrack recorders being manufactured, and have been for quite some time. So everything else is almost certainly discontinued. I suspected that the BR-600 and BR-900 were discontinued when the BR-800 was announced (March 24, 2010) and I noticed that the old models were no longer listed on the Boss Japan website nor in the 2010 Roland/Boss catalogue.

https://songcrafters.org/community/index.php?topic=6710.msg88917#msg88917

The second section ("Digital Multitrack Recorders") on the following page of my website contains links to the pages of most of the major international Roland sites where they list their current multitrack recorders (in some cases, the page also includes other non-BR recorders such as the handheld R-05, the VS-20 V-Studio, and the CD-2U portable stereo recorder).

https://songcrafters.org/64guitars/BR/BossRoland.html

Only Roland Polska (Poland) and Boss Germany (but not Roland Germany) still lists the BR-1600. That could mean that they still have some old stock, but I think it's more likely that they haven't yet updated their website to remove the discontinued BR-1600.

[AndyR]

Yep, that makes sense 64.

And it's started me wondering... If they did stop making the "grey" ones (600-1600) some time ago, a year or two maybe, and distributors are just running out of stock, and where the distributors have run out, the retailers in that region still have stock (they certainly seem to in the UK right at the moment)...

...then, what's that information saying to the bods figuring out what to make next in order to turn a profit?

If it was me, I'd be tempted to think that it's not a huge market... and we've already sold units, that are still working, to most of that market! SO, umm, let's reconsider where we might be directing our energies...

Which, from the little I've read (mainly on here), seems to be exactly what might be going on (various buy-outs and juggling for position, etc...)

[Hook]

Yea, I'm constantly looking at Musician Friend & other catalogs & it seems to me when I set up a new in house studio I'll have to either go Zoom or Tascam. I do still see new 1600's for sale on line for about $1500 & used on ebay for around $600 but with the tascam dp24 new for $500 I might have to make the leap back to tascam. Zoom I'm too sure about...Nick_ODH does some fine work with his zoom? I've always thought the easiest upgrade would be the 1600 mostly for the learning curve but there's a pretty long list of gear before that one!