Customer Reviews

Marantz PMD670 Digital Compact Flash Portable Recorder

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This is a versatile and effective digital recorder that is well suited for people looking to record meetings or complex music. It can accept line level, XLR and digital input with support for phantom power. The microphone preamps are fine, but you can use and external pre/AD and get exceptional results. I've recorded chamber music with a pair of AKG 414 and the sound is amazing. It records in more formats than I can list here, from low quality MP3 mono 32 bit great for meetings or podcasting up to 96K 16 bit raw uncompressed studio quality. Better quality than a standard CD!

Also includes a built in limiter, automatic gain, and manual level adjustments. Nice battery life. Easy to use meters. The setup menu takes some getting used to, but it you are a pro audio engineer, you will love this unit. For the novice, it basically works like a tape deck.

My favorite feature? Every time you press the red button you get a new file. This really cuts down on post production and editing.

There are smaller units with better internal microphones, but none provide the versatility of the Marantz PMD670.

This is for bird recording in the field, that was why I bought the Marantz PMD670.

The speaker is definitely very bad for conducting play-back to attract birds during fieldwork. Specially for small passerines such as Tyrannulets or Tody-Tyrants, or birds with very low voices (e.g. Pigeons and Doves) I can hardly hear what I have just recorded in the field if the bird is about 10 m or more from me. This happens even if I use an external, high-quality, Sennheiser microphone to record (as I have always doing with my old SONY TCM5000 EV). The option is to attach a external speaker to the PMD670, what does not lets me use the headphones and gives me one more thing to worry about in the field.

However, if I connect headphones to monitor imputing sound while I am recording, noise is recorded with my targeted sound as I set the hp/spk volume dial higher. The higher the volume, higher the noise.

The eight AA batteries are drained very fast (at a rate of 8 batteries/morning, compared with 4 medium sized batteries/MONTH with the TCM).

If I record mono files (note: I did not test all the input and algor/files settings, but most of them) I can also hardly listen to them in a software such as Windows Media Player. Maybe I'm not aware, but WMP would perform well only with stereo files...

I came from 12 years using a SONY TCM5000 EV tape recorder, with which I obtained superb recordings from more than 500 bird species, as well conducted thousands of play-backs, sometimes under very poor just-obtained recordings, in many Brazilian forests. Changing for the Marantz PMD670 was a very wrong choice.

I asked the dealer (who maintains the Marantz PMD670 as one of the options of digital recordings in its "Nature Division") for help but only silence came from it (!).