Re: High resolution digital recorders


"Mike Rivers" <mrivers@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1192662448.537663.165630@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Oct 17, 5:25 pm, "andrejs eigus" <l...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

A-DATA CF 16GB for $120:

Will your recorder take a 16GB card? Most of these are just catching
up with 8 GB cards.

In fact, 8 GB is relatively huge as long as you don't confuse it with an
archive.

I find that to be quite expensive since I've been
buying 120 to 160 GB hard drives for about $30, brand new.

Yeah, but powering them and carrying them and their power sources around can
be a hassle.

A $120
memory card is only considered "removable media" by those with big
budgets.

I've been keeping my Microtrack fed with a few 2 GB cards I picked up at
Micro Center for less than $20 each. I have a 4 GB card, too.

It's really fixed media and the recorder costs $120 more than
you think it does.

I would say that you're arguing from the extremes, not actual practice. I
have 5 CF cards totalling over 10 GB that all together didn't cost me $120.
That's removable media!

It may be physically removable, but most people
don't have a stack of memory cards on the shelf.

I usually carry mine in my Microtrack box.

If you can load it on
to your computer faster with a card reader than through the USB or
Firewire port, you take it out, but you put it right back in.

The file transfer speed is often limited by the speed of the CF card itself.
So the exact means you use for the transfer can be moot. I admit it, I
start a lot of file transfers and multitask doing something else for a
while. A few posts on RAP and its all done! ;-)

i will wait until 16GB drops even further and, perhaps, replace the
existing card with it. i find 8GB, however, to be quite a reasonable
amount
of space to keep recorded material.

For me 4 GB is a lot for 2 channels.

It depends on what you're doing. I often record at weekend long (or
sometimes week long) festivals where I'm also mixing the live sound.

Sounds familiar. The good news about festivals is that there are often a lot
of breaks. I generally switch out cards when they are less than 1/2 full so
that if I miss a switch, I'm not hung out to dry.

I appreciate the convenience of not having to change media during the
work day, and not having to dump it off on a computer at the end of
the day when all I want is dinner, a glass of wine and to soak in the
hot tub.

Hence removable media.

If you're recording 2-hour shows a couple of times a month,
or production audio that you're going to use as soon as you get home
with the recording, a 2-hour capacity is probably OK.

I also admit that a lot of my applications for the Microtrack are as safety
machine. We've found that safety recordings at 192 Kb keep all the customers
fooled all the time. At 192, a 2 GB card wants to last forever.

hard drives are less reliable, have moving parts and produce noise...

They are also big and heavy and relatively fragile. IME the most common
shock-related failure of portable digital recorders and players with
removable media is either the cables, batteries or the removable media
slipping out of the device! That takes a lot of hard knocking about!

I can't deny that they have moving parts, however I have never had a
problem with noise or reliability. Nothing lasts forever, and flash
memory has a finite number of write/read cycles. We don't know what
that is in terms of recording projects yet.

Many of us know what it isn't, and that is any time soon.

I don't know any recording
engineers who have "used up" a card, but I do know some photographers
who have.

IME hard drives are among the least reliable items around. They can easily
fail right after install, and they can easily fail on the shelf.


there's a speculation that 2.8 Mhz DSD isn't enough in order to
compensate
signal to noise ratio with 1-bit technology, and that the PCM 24/96 has a
better S/N ratio at 40khz than DSD

I won't argue with the numbers, but I will tell you that subjectively,
the DSD mode sounds better than 96 kHz PCM on the Korg MR-1.

I'll remain unconvinced until I see the results of a DBT. Maybe Korg's
format conversion software has some egregious flaw. There's no logical
reason for DSD to sound any different than the PCM we usually compare it too
except under rare and obscure conditions.

Both are
extremely quiet. Because of the gentle filter on the DSD output, the
high frequency response is actually flatter further out on PCM than in
the DSD mode, but either extends further than my ability to reproduce
it.

That, and record it, or hear it. Just about every mic I've ever used other
than the small omni measurement mics take a big dive somewhere between 8 KHz
and 20 KHz, particularly off-axis.

Many of my recordings go into an archive and may never be played, or
might be played for the first time 10 or 15 years after they're made.
CDs (16-bit 44.1 kHz) will probably still be playable in the future.

Furthermore, there's even more evidence that 16/44 is all that we need for
music:

"Audibility of a CD-Standard A/D/A Loop Inserted into High-Resolution Audio
Playback". E. Brad Meyer and David R. Moran. JAES 55(9) September 2007.

I can't believe that I've been working with a Nomad Jukebox 3 as my
field recorder for about five years now, but I still haven't found
anything that I can justify as a replacement (yes, money is an object).

I used up the line input jack on mine. :-(


.

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