Is there a new sheriff in town regarding portable digital audio recorders? — On January 19, 2006 “Edirol” published the first details about a successor to their first portable recorder, the “R-1″. In the last days I was busy trying to get their new product at some dealers or at least more in-depth informations, but of course failed as it is as difficult as trying to buy a recorder from one of Edirols competitors like “AEQ”, “M-Audio”, “Marantz” or “Tascam”. I don’t understand, why these companies are not able to deliver enough items to the shops and dealers, the demand from customers seems very big.
But back to the topic. So all I could get were the informations everybody can find in the World Wide Web too, but let me summarize and judge these for you.
The new recorder is called “R-09″, has half the size of the Edirol “R-1″ and offers following features:
- 24-bit uncompressed recording (WAV) with 48 or 44.1 kHz or up to 320 kb/s MP3 on a SecureDigital-Card
Notice, that there is no 96 kHz with the 24-bit possible. But somebody who has enough money for such sophisticated digital studio equipment would rather buy a Fostex FR-2 recorder than the ones from M-Audio (which has 96 kHz) or Edirol, would’nt he? And 96 kHz is not a must for me either, so I could stand the 44.1 kHz.
The Edirol R-09 works with SD-Cards from 32 MegaByte up to 2 GigaByte and using a different memory card type is clever, because many digital cameras use SD-Memorycards and the chance is high, that their owners have some high capacity SD-Cards.
Don’t worry about the price, if you don’t have any item using SD. A SD-Card with one GigaByte memory costs 55 Euro, that’s two Euro less than a CF-Card with the same memory size. SecureDigital-Cards are also smaller and thinner than CompactFlash-Cards and a lot of desktop computers and laptops have a built-in SD-card reader.
- stereo Mic- and stereo Line-Inputs (all 1/4” jacks - or 3,5mm Mini-Klinke as it is called at our place)
I really love XLR, I really do. Never had any problems with that jacks although - or should I say ‘because’ - they are bigger and heavier. Something you cannot tell about 3,5mm Mini-Klinke: A lot of radio journalists and recording prosumers had horrible experiences about wobbling jacks and high peak crackings and/or unstable audio signals. So let us hope, that Edirol builds some more durable jacks into their new R-09 recorder.
The Mic-Input is called “plug-in power supported”, but most likely that supported power is not 48 V phantom power and that would be a deficiency for sophisticated microphones users like me.
The Mic-Input jack and the Line-Input jack cannot be used simultaneously, in that case the Line input takes priority.
- High-grade stereo condenser built-in microphone
I’m allways sceptical about built-in microphones, would only use them as a kind of personal dictaphone and cannot understand, why so many people are so crazy for built-in mics. I want to be able to choose the microphone depending on the recording situation and a built-in mic cannot be changed - not to speak about recorded cracking noise from holding the recorder with your hands or if it is lying on a table from other things.
Quick online search of digital portable recorders with their price as of mid february 2006:
- Edirol “R-1″ 379,– Euro
- Edirol “R-09″ 419,– Euro
- M-Audio “MicroTrack 2496″ 439,– Euro
- Marantz “PMD-660″ 590,– Euro
- Marantz “PMD-670″ 845,– Euro
- Marantz “PMD-671″ 1.111,– Euro
- Tascam “HD-P2″ 1.090,– Euro
- Edirol “R-4″ 1.399,– Euro
- Fostex “FR-2″ 1.590,– Euro
Weblinks:
- http://createdigitalmusic.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1130&Itemid=44
- http://www.edirol.net/products/en/R-09/index.html
- http://www.edirol.net/products/en/R-09/details.html
- http://www.edirol.net/products/en/R-09/specs.html
© Oliver for CongressRadio, 2006. | Permalink | No comment
Add to del.icio.us
Search blogs linking this post with Technorati
Want more on these topics ? Browse the archive of posts filed under Uncategorized.
]]>
In a new project called “Stardust@home” researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, invite Internet users to help them search for a few dozen submicroscopic grains of interstellar dust captured by NASA’s 
Based on previous measurements of interstellar dust by both the Ulysses and Galileo spacecrafts, scientist expect to find approximately 45 grains of submicroscopic dust in the collector, a mosaic of tiles of lightweight aerogel forming a disk. Though those searching for pieces of Wild 2’s tail will easily be able to pick out the thousands of cometary dust grains embedded in the front of the detector, finding the 45 or so grains of interstellar dust stuck in the back of the detector won’t be so easy.
“Twenty or 30 years ago, we would have hired a small army of microscopists who would be hunched over microscopes focusing up and down through the aerogel looking for the tracks of these dust grains,” said Westphal. “Instead, we developed an automated microscope to scan the aerogel and hope to use volunteers we have trained and tested to search for these tracks.”
Once the grains are identified and analyzed, scientist hope, that the information will tell about the internal processes of distant stars such as supernovas, flaring red giants or neutron stars that produce interstellar dust and also generate the heavy elements like carbon, nitrogen and oxygen necessary for life.
