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Reviews: Portable Digital Audio Recorders
What a long way back it is to all those old analogue eight tracks, sometimes the vehicle for legendary music! The digital era means smaller and smaller products giving ever better performance, and with very accessible price tags.
Tristan François
Translator: Jack Sims
Updated: November 4, 2010
Translator: Jack Sims
Updated: November 4, 2010
How do we test recorders?
What better way of testing portable recorders than to use them in practice?
We take them with us into rehearsal studios, recording studios, to gigs and so on. When we can, we record the same event with several recorders at the same time, so as to compare the results directly.
And it's this regular use that allows us to spot any design faults or, of course, be really impressed!
These days, any amateur group, enthusiast or filmmaker who wants to record their own sounds (practice, concert, walk in the forest or future film masterpiece) can get hold of a small, easily transportable battery-powered device for a few hundred pounds. And the sound quality will be easily good enough to make a demo.
The market is now full of the various offerings from different brands. Whether they have been specialists in the domain for a long time (Marantz, Nagra, Roland), are new arrivals (Zoom, Olympus) or home-studio specialists (M-Audio, Line6), each has its own specialities and areas of application.
The descendants of mini discs
If there's one stand-out precursor to portable audio recorders, it has to be the Sony mini-disc. Indeed, many manufacturers have drawn on the mini-disc for the design of their own products. The high-tech world has, however, evolved quite a bit since this not-so-far-off time. Today, recorders come with internal memory, SDHC slots and microphones adapted to various uses. The internal software includes metronomes, tuners, anti-noise processing and so-on.
All these aspects of the spec should of course be taken into account before you make your final choice, which obviously needs to be made in relation to what you're going to use the device for.
The market is now full of the various offerings from different brands. Whether they have been specialists in the domain for a long time (Marantz, Nagra, Roland), are new arrivals (Zoom, Olympus) or home-studio specialists (M-Audio, Line6), each has its own specialities and areas of application.
The descendants of mini discs
If there's one stand-out precursor to portable audio recorders, it has to be the Sony mini-disc. Indeed, many manufacturers have drawn on the mini-disc for the design of their own products. The high-tech world has, however, evolved quite a bit since this not-so-far-off time. Today, recorders come with internal memory, SDHC slots and microphones adapted to various uses. The internal software includes metronomes, tuners, anti-noise processing and so-on.
All these aspects of the spec should of course be taken into account before you make your final choice, which obviously needs to be made in relation to what you're going to use the device for.
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Reviews: Portable Digital Audio Recorders
