My first Pro Tools and Mac, fully loaded with HW and SW 8 years ago, remember as now 25.000 $. Used price below 1 k.
Less effective than today's 2500 $ PC DAW with Cubase.

ADAT XTs.

Payed about $2400 for each. Would be lucky if I could get $200 for one now.

4 Adat Blackface
7 Adat XT
3 Yamaha O2R

Ouch!

Now I've switched to buying vintage amps, microphones, Hammonds, Leslies, Wurlies and a Rhodes. Much less buyers remorse.

synclavier PostPro

Waves Native bundle.... I don't have an ilock, I don't plan on upgrading to the latest version and because I built a new computer the installer keys I have will not work on the new hard drive.

I now have a product that I purchased but I can not use, I am sure there is a law against this but I did not bother fighting it because the Waves stuff does not sound all that good anyway.

Waves sucks!!!! fuuck Someone should start a class action lawsuit against them bastards. Anyway it is not worth anything at this point, at least not to me because it is sitting on a shelf, I think I paid $800 or something.

if you want to buy my da-78; it's on the other thread right now.......




- jack

Although there are some exceptions (the Drawmer 1960 comes to mind) it appears from this thread that analog equipment tends to retain its value, while digital equipment tends to lose its value.

And right quick, it seems.

Jasper

All of my adats!

Not really, rarily does anyone ask to use my old Teac reel to reel, it also is collecting dust. I bought it at an auction for $40. A new belt for it cost $15. It works, but I rarely use it. Maybe some tape transfers someday. You still need the various machines to access the various formats.


Most of my recording these days is done on the computer with Adobe's Audition 2.0 program, and I'm very happy with that.

How about your car? Loses its value the second you drive it off the showroom floor. And you have to use tons of money feeding it and maintaining it. At least those expensive ADATs and DA88s and $1000 1meg RAM chips helped you (hopefully) earn enough money to feed your cars!

Nope. I got a few "wow" 's from some of my friends, but other than that, a complete waste of money.

After about a year after I bought the DA-88,(with very light usage) the transport system fell apart and I had little gears coming out of the tape insert, and had to send it back to Tascam, they replaced the transport system and sent it back to me with a bill for $500.


It's going to be a very long time before I buy anything from Tascam again.

My 2 DA88s paid for my living expenses while taking my masters. Good investment for me...

Ouch! I think we may have a winner, folks.

I worked at a studio in the 80's that had a Synclavier, whatever the model was that was just before they started using Mac II's as their front end, so the whole computer was proprietary. Owner told me a replacement mouse cost him $1000.

But I think it's way too easy to cite computers & their peripherals in this thread. Heck, I still own a 275MB SCSI drive that cost more than any multi-gigabyte drive I ever bought subsequently. Mike Jasper may be on to something with his observation that analog gear maintains its value better than digital.

It also seems to be more cyclical: I can't imagine ADATs ever again being worth $3000, but I fully expect to see Mackie 8-buss desks climbing in price in another decade or two, when no one's making new analog boards anymore.

Software plug-ins.

If it still works, I bet you could sell it for more than the $40 you paid.

Jasper
PS -- What model?

I'm starting to think of computers and software as 'things I rent' instead of 'things I own'. I get to use a powerful tool for 3 or 5 years, then...poof! It turns back into a pumpkin and mice.

Model # AR-40S I believe it was made in the late 60's or early 70's and original price at that time was $450-500. I saw an old original ad for it on the internet. What it's worth today is anybodys's guess, but because reel to reels aren't being made by many manufactures the supply of reel to reel machines is dwindling. And on rare occassion, I do indeed do transfers. So it's important to me to have a reel to reel machine.

Like I said, I replaced the drive belt, the old one turned to mush, and I have checked it out, and it works like new. I even did test tone recordings and both channels came out good. I really like the pre-amp sound it has. In it's day, $450 for any tape recorder was a lot of money, so I consider it a quality deck.


Will Mackie 8-bus boards rise in value ?? Who knows, but I like mine, and just spent a good number of hours cleaning it up, so now it looks almost like new.
To replace it with an Onyx board would cost around $4,000 with no meter bridge, sooooo forget it for now. I've gotten 10-12 years of daily trouble-free use out of it, so that kind of evens things out for me.

I think there's a few things that we take for granted as 'losing value' like computers, and software. I KNOW that my computer will be worth less tomorrow than it is today.

I think that most gear loses value over time, and some great gear regains its value after it has dropped over time.

Very very few pieces of gear actually appreciate in value however- analogue or digital. Analogue holds better, as there is rarely a 'new version' that comes out every month that quickly makes it obselete.

I think the repairablity of analogue gear also factors in. Digital gear is a bitch to repair. Surface Mounted Components, microprocessors, lack of documentation, etc... make digital things really hard to repair- in addition to the fact that the circuits are generally 10x as complicated as most analogue circuitry (Compare a Liquid Channel against a Neve 1073 internally!).

The fact that it CAN be repaired relatively easily factors in I think for the pricing. Older analogue stuff still costs a certain amount, because so much has been put in (hopefully) to the unit to keep it going. It's like adding labour cost to it all over again!

With this in mind, certain Vintage Digital pieces will probably maintain/skyrocket in value again at some point in the next few years above what they are now for the working units. When there's only a couple dozen fully working 1580S's out there, and people want that sound, it will come down to supply and demand. That is, unless there is some really breakthrough technology that allows us to emulate them, or someone just starts making them again.

BF Adats (2 of them new at $3000 each).

I think I sold them for $450, before they became completly useless.