2001: The VS-2480

In January 2000, Roland again broke new ground when it announced the VS-2480 Digital Audio Workstation, shown in Figure 1.7. The VS-2480 was the first self-contained hard disk desktop recording workstation to offer 24-track/24-bit digital recording. The VS-2480 incorporated a long list of new features, as well as conveniences such as motorized faders and "drag and drop" editing, and wrapped the package in a very affordable price.

Figure 1.7. Roland VS-2480 Digital Studio Workstation

Highlights of the VS-2480

The VS-2480 brought so many great new features to the VS series, it's impossible to list them all in this section. Here are some brief highlights of the VS-2480:

• Sample rates up to 96kHz

• 64-channel digital mixer with motorized faders

• 56-bit internal mixing bus

• Sixteen simultaneous recording tracks, 24 simultaneous playback tracks

• Up to eight onboard stereo effect processors, 2 pre-installed

• Sixteen analog ¼" balanced inputs and 8 XLR inputs with phantom power

• Hard drive usability: 13 partitions, 10GB per partition

• Dynamic processing and 5- band EQ on every channel

• 24-voice Phase Sample Pads for triggering and arranging samples directly from disk

• VGA monitor output and mouse-based waveform editing and control

Software Upgrades

There have been a number of operating system upgrades for the VS-2480, many of which introduced even more features. These new features included the ability to split and combine projects, full import and export capabilities for all previous VS workstations, .WAV file export, Automix enhancements, and more. Perhaps the biggest upgrade was in January 2002, which implemented full support for an external VGA monitor. In 2004, a new operating system upgrade was announced, which allowed the VS-2480 to use the new VS8F-3 Plug-in effects board.