A pair of mics, four phantom-powerable XLR connectors (with the ability to add two more via an accessory replacement of the mic pair), mixer, battery-operated... this thing is an amazing miniature multi-track recording studio. I have been using it mostly for recording my live sitar performances in front of an indoor cafe at a local cancer hospital, Sunday traditional choir Masses at my church, and miscellaneous outdoor live settings. It's very convenient and sounds fabulous.
I use NiMH rechargeable batteries. I ran it flat out one time and it was able to record for about 15 hours on one charge. The funny thing is the battery segments drop to one after only a few hours, so that's not much use as an indicator of remaining time. It has a menu setting that lets you specify the type of battery, rechargeable vs. alkaline, because of the voltage difference. But that doesn't make this indication of remaining battery any more accurate! :-) No worries, I just recharge the batteries from time to time and it's not really an issue.
Another thing I've noticed is the timebase is a little off for some reason. I have had multiple Sony handheld stereo recorders over the years, as well as a KORG D3200 multi-track recorder, all of which I have been able to sync together over long periods of time (I do video work) with absolutely no drift between them. I just thought this was something they had handled in the digital world, with crystal-controllable clocks of extreme precision.
But when I take a two hour recording from this device and put it up against my other recording devices, there will be a very small drift between them (10 - 20 millseconds) by the end of two hours. This is a VERY subtle and tiny difference that most people wouldn't even care about or notice, but it IS noticeable if you are doing sync work with video. It shows up as sounds being in different places when you load the waveforms into a computer and blow them up. This is the amount of time that short reverberations off of nearby hard surfaces take. So if you are recording things in a reverberant space, like a church, this drift can interfere with the natural sound of your recording. It means you have to cut it into a few pieces and make micro-adjustments to the timing every 30 minutes or so to keep it under control. Or you have to set it going for a few hours at the same time as your other recorder, figure out the percentage difference, and apply that amount of timing correction in your audio software every single time. It's not the end of the world, but it IS an added pain when I have gotten used to NOT having to do that for the past 20 years working with digital recordings.
Also, it seems to me when doing critical listening that this recorder may not produce as crystal-clear, clean recordings at volume extremes as other devices I own or have used, especially when recording loud, impulse-y things like church choirs with sopranos. I'm not talking about clipping either. Even well below clipping level, I swear I can hear something happen that is hard to characterize when a loud peak is reached by female singers. It's one of those things that drives you nuts as you listen to side-by-side recordings from different recorders and you try to figure out if you are really hearing something or not. It doesn't really sound like brick-walling either. We should be well within the capabilities of the mics and pres at the levels and distances from the subjects that I am recording.
So, all-in-all it's a great recorder for most things, especially if you aren't using it to sync to something else or for super-loud, impulsive subjects, but I give it 4 stars for these admittedly highly subjective observations. I haven't checked this sound issue with my own mics yet (R0de NT-5's) which I know can handle jet engines and things like that.
Your mileage may vary.
A couple more quick positive notes to finish... it can act as a 6-channel audio interface to your computer as well as a stand-alone recorder. That's VERY convenient if you want to record things directly to hard drive using your DAW software! And the memory capacity is great, too. I put a 16 GB memory card in it and that gives me over 15 stereo hours, almost 8 at four channels, and over 5 at six channels. And you can put MUCH bigger memory cards in it! I had to install ASIO4ALL (a free ASIO driver) to make this device work with my computer, but it works flawlessly.
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