I picked up a BRC ,
It passed the self test for all the leds, displays and buttons , so thats a good start ,
Its in good nick overall .
Its been a long time since I layed eyes on a BRC , maybe 30 years ,
It always had a feel of quality well beyond its price tag and it places all the traditional tape machine remote/autolocate controls just where you want them at your right hand ,
Mine is dated 1997 , one of the later units with V2.04 firmware , thats as far as it went I think .
Some earlier hardware revisions had sync problems and needed modification by service techs ,
thats all covered in the service docs ,
There was also a change in the spec of the 9 pin sync cable later on ,they increased the diameter of the conductors and used better sheilding , that helped sort out a lot of troubles people had ,
As to opperation with a HD24 ,
It supposedly does but with some caveats ,
it wont do 88.2 or 96khz mode
And some special functions relating to the ADAT tape system arent applicable to the HD24 ,
likewise some HD24 functions arent covered by the BRC .
Theres a few other minor niggles , with work arounds , but it should work .
One things for sure unless this thing see's some kind of ADAT sync the transport controls remain parked and it isnt going anwhere,
I should be able to do some more basic tests later with Reaper ,to check send/ recieve and lock to SMPTE , I dont anticipate any issues there ,
There was one guy I read online ,
He was using the HD24 as an A/D convertor , via ADAT out into the computer and also Midi from the BRC to control the DAW ,
It basically gave him the full functionality of the BRC ,
I was taking a look around at the HD24 ,
they go cheap now but only had the IDE interface ,
noisey, power hungry and slow drives .
A few seem to have successfully installed modern SATA SSD drives ,
it cuts down on power consumption from the PSU and vastly reduces the noise the machine makes , There is a cooling fan built into the HD24 and sometimes the drive caddies as well , but that might not even be nessesary with SSD drives installed ,
I see good examples of HD24's going for a few hundred ,
its a well capable machine at 24ch ,48khz , 24 bit , It can do 96khz but only via the optical with reduced track count to 12 and without the BRC being of any use .
If higher sample rates were needed , the HD24 could just as easily work away in the backround at 48khz , then you could sync Reaper to the BRC's SMPTE output and Midi .
There was a guy here a few years back made a usb based control surface for Reaper and programmed it all up himself
he took inspiration from the BRC ,
I think Abbey got the pcbs and metal work ,but I dont know what happened after that .
I was able to generate a SMPTE timecode track on the website I showed previously ,
I played that out of my audio interface , the BRC in SMPTE test mode readily locked and displayed TC which matched exactly the reading on Reaper ,
I was also able to read SMPTE from the BRC through an audio input and have Reaper chase to timecode . It all feels really rock solid .