Playing the Field

Oct 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Nick Peck

           
 

Thanks to the popularity of notebook computers and digital cameras, evolutionary technology has led to new, relatively low-cost products that are extremely useful for the music, film, and broadcast-audio communities. Solid-state removable RAM cards and small, high-capacity hard drives have improved by leaps and bounds as prices have dropped steadily. Many audio professionals will remember 2005 as the year that tapeless field recording became affordable.

For decades, film-audio professionals have used the legendary and ubiquitous Nagra analog field recorders. Though large, heavy, and somewhat cumbersome, they sound incredibly good, conveying all the richness (and inherent hiss) of analog tape. In the '90s, portable DAT recorders made serious inroads among field recordists. The cost and size of DAT tape, as well as the lack of noise and the price of the units, were tough to beat. But DAT also has at least three disadvantages: the tiny tapes are fragile, you must transfer your field recordings to a DAW for editing in real time, and DAT is limited to 16-bit, 48 kHz audio. Over the past five years, excellent hard-drive-based field recorders have emerged from companies such as Nagra, Deva, and HHB, moving the industry into the random-access age. Those specialty products, however, are priced out of the reach of most individuals.

Enter the more modestly priced tapeless field recorder. A number of products that record to either CompactFlash cards or to notebook-size hard drives have emerged in the past year or two. Whether you are a musician looking to record your rehearsals and gigs with little hassle, a sound designer interested in capturing new real-world grist for your signal-processing mill, a concert recordist interested in getting that performance in high fidelity, or a location recordist garnering production dialog and effects on the set, an excellent new product is out there to fit your needs. EM decided to take a look at what some of these great new recorders have to offer.

One of the big challenges in any product roundup is determining what to include and what to leave out. In the interest of fairness, EM's editors and I devised a set of rules to help with that decision. Because affordability is paramount, each unit had to have a retail price below $3,000 (and most are priced less than $2,000). We don't consider laptops with USB audio interfaces to be sufficiently rigorous to withstand many common field-recording situations, so we limited our scope to standalone devices. Finally, sound quality is crucial, so we limited our coverage to products that have the ability to record linear uncompressed audio.

Nonetheless, the included recorders do vary greatly in price and intended applications. Most are stereo, one is a 4-track recorder, and two are intended primarily for recording speech. The most expensive model costs almost five times as much as the least expensive one. I will discuss the less costly recorders first and then work my way up in ascending order of price.

To help with the evaluation process, I selected a few audio professionals who make field recording an integral part of their careers. I handed each of them one of these products to take out on a real-world mission. Their impressions and subjective results accompany the product descriptions.

EDIROL R-1

The Edirol R-1 ($550) is a handheld, CompactFlash-based portable recorder (see Fig. 1). Slightly too large to be called pocket-size, it does manage to pack impressive specs into a small package. The R-1 records 16- and 24-bit uncompressed WAV files at 44.1 kHz and MP3 files at rates from 64 kHz to 320 kHz. With a built-in stereo mic, half-speed playback, on-the-fly looping, and built-in effects, it functions as a terrific composing and practicing recorder. A stereo minijack provides an input for external microphones, and it supplies 2V plug-in power for electret condenser mics as well. For rapid data transfer, the R-1 will connect to any PC or Mac through USB.

FIG. 1: The Edirol R-1 delivers the goods in a small, inexpensive package.

As with most of the units covered in this article, the R-1 includes a 64 MB CompactFlash card to get you started, but it is far too small to be of practical use. With it, the R-1 can barely record 3 minutes of 24-bit uncompressed material. With almost daily price reductions of CompactFlash media, though, storage cost really shouldn't be an issue. The R-1 can see partitions as large as 4 GB, so anything larger will have to be split into multiple partitions.

Little Wonder

Tim Nielsen is a sound designer and editor who has worked on Pirates of the Caribbean and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He used the R-1 for a month and liked it. In terms of sound quality, he said that it “was better than expected for a $400 recorder, even when using the internal stereo mic. While it's no replacement for a high-end professional recorder, the input stages appear fairly clean, and I was generally impressed with the sound. I tested the R-1 with a pair of Audio-Technica omnidirectional lavalier mics. While not audiophile in any sense, that pairing generated surprisingly high-quality recordings.”

Tim liked the streamlined nature of the R-1, but he found a few glitches as well. “Usability is about as simple as can be, but it's here that the R-1 shows a couple of flaws. The first is the metering, which is accomplished with a 15-segment, mono, sluggish LED display. The meter updates are so slow that it's useless as a peak meter and appears to be showing averaged levels.”

The R-1 has some simple and marginally useful built-in effects such as three simple reverbs, simple EQ, and a de-esser; Tim liked the effects for monitoring. “While none of the effects are quite up to snuff to use for recording, they're convenient to have on playback. But there is a flaw: if you engage them while recording, they will be recorded, and the audio-effects button is easily bumped. If you're not monitoring while recording, you could be in for a nasty shock as you playback later only to find bad simulated plate reverb married to your recordings. The R-1 does have a hold button, though, a nice safety feature that should prevent any mishaps.”

All in all, Tim was impressed with the R-1, especially as a replacement for a portable DAT or a MiniDisc recorder (see the sidebar, “HHB MDP500 MiniDisc Recorder”). “While it's no competition for my Sound Devices 722, I could easily see replacing my Sharp MiniDisc with the R-1. I loved the ease of use, the quality for the recordings, and the simplicity of drag-and-drop file transfers. I wish it were a bit smaller, that the batteries lasted a bit longer, and that the metering was more usable. But as it is, it's a bargain for the price, and as a practice or composing tool, it's perfect.”