BOSS BR-800 Portable Digital Recorder

Feels flimsy unlike the Tascam which is solid and well made and thicker and heavier. Reviews say too many menus and scrolling but I'm ok with it as you get the portability. Love the sliders , about the size of an A4 piece of paper. Fairly Intuitive but some stuff is quite hard to find on the menus. I bought for monitoring vocals the Tascam DP03SD sounded unsubstantial like singing in a tin can . I have a boss BR8 from 2000. I've been looking for a portable device to replace it. Tried; zoom R8 zoom R24, other newer boss including BR80 (bought it) , Tascam DP03SD ......They all sound like the sound is coming out of a tin on the monitor mix. It's fine when you put it on a PC daw dry then add effects but like I said it sounds horrible when monitoring. None come up to the vocal monitoring of my very old boss br8. It's the closest sound to a studio . It's gorgeous. Especially when you are doing vocals it makes you sing better when you can hear the nuances of the sound. Now this boss br800 is "boss" it's fantastic. It's nearly as good as the br8 for monitoring. I'm thrilled. Sound quality wise it's not as good as the br8. But for editing eq , compression, delay , reverb, etc etc it's superb. The other 8 tracks didn't have this functionality unless I couldn't find how to do it. And it can fit it in my "handbag" or even a guitar gig bag it's so small . Of course you need a bag of leads which mean a big bag bigger than the br800! It is a lot more expensive than the Tascam zoom etc. £150 more than the zoom and &/£100 more than the Tascam in fact. It's a lot of money for me but actually it's quite cheap when you consider how good it is compared to the competitors. If you aren't bothered about the monitoring go for the other makes as they are brilliant better for some tasks in fact the zoom came out best for functionality.

I already have a 16 track digital multitrack recorder which I use to record and produce commercially available recordings of my own music and that of other solo artists and smalll acoustic bands. However, I wanted something small and very portable with absolute ease of use and quality of sound for making quality but more immediate recordings. I am unlikely to use the guiyar effects although they have been fum to play around with. The ability to multitrack was a necessity for me and the ability to use either exrernal mics or the food quality inbuilt mics was big advantage. I knew the drum sounds would be good as I already use the DR 880Very pleased with the Boss. I wouldn't use it to realease commercial CD's at the moment but for what I needed it is ideal.

I bought this unit after using a BR-1600CD for many years. The 1600 was luggable butr it did a great job of recording up to 8 mic lines concurrently, with loads of EQ/effects and an onboard 'mastering' toolkit enabling the full production process including burning a CD in a single box! Quite a unit. The band split up and i've not needed anything so capable again. But recording acoustic instruments and voices - BR-800 comes into its own. With an instantly familiar operating system and recording external 2-4 mic lines at a time it serves its purpose well. I don't use the guitar effects or drum machine but as a tool for acoustic guitars and voice, captured with a couple of AKG C1000S mics (battery-powered condenser mics) your in business. The mastering toolkit allows compression and limiting so you're pretty much there. USB to PC is easy. The sound quality is good enough at 16bit, 44kHz, especially if you are going to distribute recordings through streaming platforms. I would have preferred native WAV format on the SD card, and phantom power on two mic lines instead of just one. Buy hey - its a great unit that fits in quite a niche position in the market, from an ultra-reliable manufacturer. Well done Roland/BOSS.

Great product, great service! Expected delivery was 12/5 and it turned up on 2/5, I was over the moon!

This machine is really irritating. The touch sensitive controls are far too sensitive and jump you into another function at the slightest slip. Buttons would have been fine, like on the BR-600. It no longer has a rhythm pattern editor, unlike the BR-600. You have to download some software, which in my case refuses to connect with the BR-800, and I have no idea how to fix it our where to find help in this faceless digital age. My BR-600 is slowly going to seed but is still better than this stupid machine.

Really happy with this. I can record all I need to and when I get round to working out October the rhythm editor I'll be dead chuffed.

Everything good

I didnt really enjoyed working with this recorder. Didnt liked this all sensor panel. Sometimes you just cant hit the right button because you just dont feel where it is. Guitar effects sound is really bad! The ones you can have with plugins on your compuiter will sound much better. And recorded sound itself is not very good aswell! For this price you can have much better device of even few of them! Its good just for one reason - easy to record on the go! For anyhing else go for something different!