
Damn! You guys be kicking some super misguided information.
The Akai MG series mixers are sick. They have a very professioanl EQ section. It is 3 band, but it's sweepable on all ranges. It uses a Beta-Max tape. The M20-J's. They are still accessable you just got to know where to lookg. They are $25 a tape, hold 30 minutes of time. The tape with is almost an inch thick. So you can hit the tape pretty nice and get some tape saturation. You can't hit it like a 1/2" reel, but you can go over 0db a few db's and not trip. The faders are butter. 100mm, long throw. Use the same guiding strip as the old Brit/Jap consoles. Lots of professional features man. Plenty of in/out routing options etc.
I use to have a 1214. If you know what your doing, you can make real professional recordings off that. They will rival almost any underground artists sound, and i've had people thinking I got my stuff mastered at a big studio. They are heavy as shit though, and takes 2 people to carry unless your a Gureilla, which I am not. (I'd say if your like 250+ and over 6'3 you might be able to do it yourself). Most of them are modded with a button that is a kill switch for the motor. So you can make the motor last longer. It's an azymuth adjusted tape sping, meaning, it just keeps spinning had that mod not been on there, the second the machine is turn on. They work that way to reduce wow and flutter (stretching) of the tape. The transport controls work well and it rewinds stupid fast. So it's not to much down time going from track to track.
The only warning I got is, EQ post record. If you EQ before (pre) it hits the tape, your gonna have to readjust everything because the tape changes the sound of the recording drastically. Everything gets seperated and shit, it's beautiful.
I miss mine. Might buy another down the line.
Btw. Make sure you get one mint. These m.f.'s are pricey to fix. Since Akai got bought out.
Also, Quantagy tape is for true Reel-to-Reels. And that was a false alarm. Quantagy went out of business, but was actually bought out by a private group. They intend to re-manufacture tape, but it's at thier discretion which series of tape and what sizes.