The Roland VS 840 is a kinda late 90's digital recording station with a drum machine, I see 'em on ebay for pretty cheap. Anyone have experience with them? It's definitely outdated, runs on zip drives, but might be a kinda neat thing to mess with. I like some of the cheapo in-between tech that shows up. This sort of stuff bridges the vintage analog and software tech gap, even the instruction video i've seen feature dudes with recently cut mullets and interesting vest/shirt combos.

Hi Lucas,

until recently I used a Roland VS-880EX for recording, which was a little larger version with an internal hard drive instead of ZIP disks.
I enjoyed using it for more than ten years, for my purposes the sound was good, and I liked the internal effects. The only real downside was the small display, but I got used to working with that after a while.
I guess the VS-840 will be similar in quality. But I have no idea if it is still possible to get ZIP disks.
By the way, I'm not sure if there really was a drum machine in the VS-840? There isn't one in my VS-880EX.

I think that maybe the ebay post I'd seen was either misleading or misinformed about the drum machine thing. Ebay would probably be the way to go for old zip disks as well...I dunno. Ultimately it'd proably be easier just to get some software, but I'm always on the lookout for interesting and strange ways to record. I've an old tascam 4-track that I probably should attempt to resurrect, see if I can get some cassettes on ebay.