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Non-Tech : Any info about Iomega (IOM)? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rll who wrote (46167)	1/29/1998 12:39:00 PM
From: Rocky Reid	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 58324

Re: Roland Vs-840 and Zip I find this product a little weird. It's earlier, bigger brother, the Vs-880 (yes, the same recorder that dropped Jaz because of reliability problems) was/is the best selling digital recorder of all time, selling more than 30,000 units. Bear in mind that virtually ANY music device like a synthesizer or recorder is considered a sales success if it sells more than 10,000 units. The pro-sumer Vs880 and consumer Vs-840 use a data compression scheme to record, unlike the professional and pricy Roland DM-800 or Digidesign's Pro-Tools which use no compression for maximum sound quality.. According to the Roland web page, rolandus.com the Vs-840 has no internal hard drive like the vs-880 does. So, you have to record onto Zip discs. This is what I think is the weird part. Zip discs only hold 100MB. This is simply not enough space to record a typical 5 minute song at best quality using all 8 tracks. Roland claims to be able to record up to 37 minutes of audio on a Zip using best quality. 37minutes / 8tracks = 4:38 minutes/track. So, you can record a song that is at the most 4 minutes and 38 seconds using all 8 tracks. This ignores the fact that you can't even touch the other 64 virtual tracks, because there is no room! I noticed that there is an optional SCSI interface for the Vs-840. This should prove to be a very popular add-on so one can use a real hard disc to record onto, and save the final recording mix onto Zip. One thing, musicians do not generally have the discretionary income a lot of other people have, so buying Zip discs would be a major expense. On the other hand, the tie ratios for this machine could be incredible. We'll see. *If Iomega were to lower the price for Zip discs, it would really help.