CongressRadio » Podcasting tools — new recorder with 24 bit from Edirol

Podcasting tools — new recorder with 24 bit from Edirol 22.02.2006

Edirol R-09

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