Bump. I imagine this will have to be it then.

I have a very old unbalanced desk that will work as 8 into 2 or 4 into 4. High hiss and no clip lights.

I also have an umpteen channel desk that I'm pretty sure will work as an 8 into 8 (or more)

Now what I want is something that will record 4 preferably 8 tracks at once - which I can then re-record to affect frequency compensation and/or add FX, in due course to remix down to 2 tracks.

Once upon a time Amstrad did a sort of home studio putting 8 tracks onto a standard cassette, and I've seen another cassette based tool that did 6 or 8 tracks. 8 track recorders on quarter or half or even inch tape used to be common if very expensive.

But now what is there? 10 years ago there were 8-track soundcards for computers, but they seem to have vanished with XP. As far as I can understand the native input to say an i-pad can do stereo and no more.

I've got a 6-track digital thingy somewhere, but it's everything hidden down multilayered menus, put it on the internal hard drive, then write to (say) a stereo minidisc. Does my brain in!

All I want is something that works like an 8-track tape deck (not an "8-track" as in old fashioned car sound systems.

Open to suggestions!