Am I wrong about this?

[bobafet1]

So, I'm trying to justify spending $3-$4k on a decent field recorder/mixer because everyone says I must have one to do professional sound recording. Honestly, wouldn't it be cheaper to just plug my laptop into a Mackie 8 channel mixer and use that setup to record just as good of sound? I understand that I will be sacrificing mobility but that isn't my concern for now. I just want to know if I can get the same/better results using the proposed setup vs. a super expensive field mixer??

your thoughts?

[Soundie76]

It depends on what your end use is?

[bobafet1]

It depends on what your end use is?

can you please expand on this?

[JordanBlock]

Are you looking to get paid by other people to do production sound? If yes, then the appropriate gear is basically mandatory.

If you're just looking to do sound for your own things, then you can work around less than ideal equipment.

[Petrus]

A dedicated field recorder like Sound Devices is much easier to use, has better features and will give better sound quality than the laptop rig you suggest. How much better the quality it is from your standpoint, how much you appreciate the convenience and reliability and how much you want to pay for it is your choice only.

[davefisk]

It really depends on mobility. Using a mackie mixer (like the Onyx with the firewire out) has been done. It's not beyond the realm of possibility. Just keep in mind unless you get a DC mod for it, you have to run off AC. Mackie's aren't bad mixers. The first mixer I ever learned was a 1604, and they are quite capable units. I had a mackie in my old video game sound design studio for temp dialogue, music playback, and routing my main monitors. Having a mackie can serve many different purposes for you in the long run. If it works for what you are doing, go for it. My only beef with them is that they don't really use separate channel strips, so if a channel goes bad, you have to send the whole board in, you can't just pull out a channel like on a high end field panel mixer like a cooper or sonosax. But again, they are quite capable, and inexpensive considering what they can do.

[ggrantly]

FWIW,

I have a Motu Traveler Mk3 FW interface which costs well under a grand. It has four pretty decent pre-amps, is like a audio swiss army knife for inputs - outputs, drives my edit suite monitors, has about the same footprint as a laptop (stackable) and it can be powered via 12v, AC, or firewire. Now this is no bag mixer, but if your levels aren't jumping around and you don't need mobility, this is a decent choice for laptop recording at a much nicer price if you already have a laptop. One note: the included software is powerful, but kinda kludgy, so expect some learning curve time, but all the same functions can be adjusted with the physical controls, which are equally difficult. Everything is there, it just takes some practice.

Grant

[nosys70]

recording is not what you get, is how you use it. Mic placement, mic type is the first to consider and heavily change according to what you are recording.
Mics will induce "color" of sound, and you could get a technically perfect recording with the wrong color, and it will sounds bad.
then there is the preamp that will induce noise. So usually good preamp is a must and is found only on high quality (expensive) equipement.
But if you record hard rock band, there are chances you can do that even with noisy preamp.
And preamp must be matched with mics, low signal mics need the preamp to work harder, then more noise. So an average preamp with a high level mic could be better than
a weak mic with an good preamp set at maximum.
after that , usually all is digital and do not makes difference. A small recorder like the H1 ($99) should be as good as the most expensive device at several thousand $ at throwing bits on a memory card.
So invest in good mics, eventually in a good preamp, and then you can feed the line level signal to any recording/mixing device.

[Petrus]

A small recorder like the H1 ($99) should be as good as the most expensive device at several thousand $ at throwing bits on a memory card.
So invest in good mics, eventually in a good preamp, and then you can feed the line level signal to any recording/mixing device.

Best field recorders give 120 dB dynamic range and S/N ratio, cheap pocket recorders struggle to get 90 dB S/N ratio, even if they record an additional 8 bits of trash to give "24 bit resolution". There is a reason why the best AD converters cost several thousand dollars per channel, thinking that the $3 ADC chip in H1 can match that is preposterous.

Naturally this difference in quality will be and often is lost with bad mics, bad miking, bad material, bad post processing, bad lossy compression and bad reproduction systems are used, but it is there in the beginning.

[marsupilami_4]

Best field recorders give 120 dB dynamic range and S/N ratio, cheap pocket recorders struggle to get 90 dB S/N ratio, even if they record an additional 8 bits of trash to give "24 bit resolution". There is a reason why the best AD converters cost several thousand dollars per channel, thinking that the $3 ADC chip in H1 can match that is preposterous.

Naturally this difference in quality will be and often is lost with bad mics, bad miking, bad material, bad post processing, bad lossy compression and bad reproduction systems are used, but it is there in the beginning.

Correct me if I'm wrong but provided you feed the recorder with line level, and even assuming you use the best preamp out there, even the best mics' self-noise will make that difference in SNR pretty much irrelevant, at least with the small-diaphragm condensers used in dialogue recording (for instance Schoeps MK41 has a 79 dB SNR).

That's not to say that there isn't a difference between a $100 recorder and a $10000 one but I agree with nosys70 that with today's digital recorders there are many elements in the chain that have a much higher impact on sound quality than the recorder's converters.