Home studio

In the 1980s, Tascam introduced the Portastudio line of four and eight-track cassette recorders for home studio use.

In the simplest configuration, rather than playing a pair of stereo channels of each side of the cassette, the typical "portastudio" used a four-track tape head assembly to access four tracks on the cassette at once (with the tape playing in one direction). Each track could be recorded to, erased or played back individually, allowing musicians to overdub themselves and create simple multitrack recordings easily, which could then be mixed down to a finished stereo version on an external machine. To increase audio quality in these recorders, the tape speed was sometimes doubled to 3 3/4 inches per second in comparison to the standard 1 7/8 ips; additionally, dbx, Dolby B or Dolby C noise reduction provided compansion (compression of the signal during recording with equal and opposite expansion of the signal during playback), which yields increased dynamic range by lowering the noise level and increasing the maximum signal level before distortion occurs. Multi-track cassette recorders with built-in mixer and signal routing features ranged from easy-to-use beginner units up to professional-level recording systems.^[34]

Although professional musicians typically only used multitrack cassette machines as "sketchpads," Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska", was recorded entirely on a four-track cassette tape.