New fieldwork toy
Apparently Edirol are bringing out a new solid state recorder: the R-09. It’s being released in late April for shipping in early May. Rumour has it that they’ve fixed the problems associated with the R-1, such as really low built-in preamp, and they’ve improved the built-in mic as well. It takes SD cards. I have to wonder what other issues they’ve introduced, though. There must be a reason that so many other recorders are flash-based rather than SD-based. And is there any other recorder which has ‘reverb’ as one of the 3 buttons on the front?
March 10, 2006 at 6:56 pm
That sounds interesting! I bought the R-1 a couple of months ago. I haven’t tested it in a real field environment so far, but a grad student of mine has taken it with her and I will see what she thinks about it. It seems that we need another recorder for the department anyway and I can order the R-09 instead, but if it takes SD cards instead of flash cards that is inconvenient, because we need more cards of a different type. The main problem about the R-1 that I see is that battery life is so short. And it doesn’t look nice, but that’s a minor point.
March 10, 2006 at 8:11 pm
The battery life is supposedly several hours with good batteries (how long is your student getting? Is she using alkaline batteries?) There are issues with the recording level. Robert and I tested one and the levels were really low, ok for the one-on-one recording I tend to do (when you can mic an individual speaker) but hopeless for conversational recording.