the reason moogs were (and stll are?) popular is the sound is “large” (hard to explain in text). On I feel love the Moog went straight into the desks with only standard 3 way “British” EQ (this in fact is a shared design found in most European kit which the Germans and Dutch had a good hand in designing and now widely copied by the Chinese). No other effects units were put into the chain.
30-40 years ago sound engineers and producers neither had the resources nor the time to piss around with loads of extra kit. Today you can kit out a entire project studio for way less than the price of a decent bicycle (either an ebike or the sort of bike you could win races on if you are fit enough).
My old AKAI 4000DS is unfortunately still in the garage at Reading, it was too bulky to bring up here (might try and get it down some time as some old boys have started making the bits for it again, as Akai aren’t worried about copyright for a 40 year old piece of kit and today they can work with the Japanese, Chinese and Malaysians who all like good hi fi).
Some dude round my way who built his own eco house with wind/solar panels sells open reel decks as a sideline, but they are hard to find as the old anoraks hoard them (especially the portable UHER Report as twitchers and other natural history types prefer them for recording birds etc) and studio size ones are bulky and heavy. Also a spool of tape costs something stupid these days £18 for a 19cm reel or £25 for 27cm and you only get 1 hour recording at 19cm/s.
Apparently they are still liked for mastering by drum and bass producers. The reason for this is actually interlinked with the Moog – with analogue equipment you can very slightly redline your recording levels and it will give a extra bit of bass. Don’t ever do this with digital kit (especially not for broadcasting online radio) it will clip and sound shit, and worse can destroy the loudspeakers of those listening to it.
