Therefore I got into restoring the Fostex to some kind of usable condition. I took of the cover and all the controls and gave them a proper cleaning (fortunately I do not spend every friday night showering an old Fostex). The insides of the mixer also got quite some amount of contact cleaner to get rid of the noise. All had to be done from the top of the mixer since the bottom was covered with a giant circuit-board, glad I didn't have to do anything with that.
When both the inside and outside seemed fairly clean I simply put it together and connected the most important gear. It took a while to tort out where to set all the switches and even where to connect my amplifier and the iPhone I use for recording. But when I finally figured everything out, after consulting the manual, it really sounded quite nice. Compared to the Mackie it sounded kind of thick and it handled all the frequencies of my Solina String Ensemble through my DOD Phaser. Something I never really got that good in the Mackie. I'm really looking forward to record something with it to see how it can affect the final mix. Haven't thought to much about analog/digital or preamps in mixers before. But thinking about it, why wouldn't it matter.
Right now it feels really nice to be limited to 8 channels and it sure looks like a dream after cleaning ;-)
Right now it feels really nice to be limited to 8 channels and it sure looks like a dream after cleaning ;-)