The major recorders reviewed & compared

Blackout

Blackout

Veteran
I now can say I have had a good amount of experience on the major recorders out there that you see on film sets big & small except for perhaps the diva system. I rate them in this order from best to worst and give points to various features with 1 being worst and 10 being superior.

Sound Devices 702 & up: Absolute top of the line, at least with my high end sanken cs3-e and even with a 416. Almost no noise, and you can hear a feather move with absolute clarity. I talked to a guy at sound devices and finally clarified that if you can swing it, it is in fact better to use the preamps on the recorder of the 7xx series than the preamps on the mixers. Of course you lose the easy mixing capability but if you are shooting small scale and just booming a few actors, it's the way to go. Headphone out is powerful and louder than you'd ever need. LED lights can light up New York.

Score: Preamps 10, A/D Converters 10, Headphone amp: 10, I/O Feautures 10, Display & Level Metering 10, Cost 6 (too pricey for most at about 2 grand & up)

Tascam HD-P2
Pretty good. Like a flash card version of the old portadats that used to be the standard on film sets. Preamps are decent but not great but a/d convertors are very good but not the best. Best results going into a mixpre or 4xx series mixer and then into the tascam line in. It has timecode which I barely ever use but sometimes I do so it's nice to have it. Headphone amp is a bit weak and has to be turned almost all the way up with standard sony v6 or 7506 headphones.

Score: Preamps 7, A/D Converters 8, Headphone amp: 6.5, I/O Feautures 8, Display & level Metering 6 (not very bright), Cost 9 (price just dropped from $1000 to $750. This is a deal.)

Fostex FR2LE

This is a odd beast. It is a capable recorder but it has very bad headphone out that is weak and hissy so you are worried about your sound the whole time but when you get it back into the computer the hiss you heard is not there. I find this a major annoyance, but if you can only afford $600, you can get some good sound out of this box. Note, its big brother, the FR2, is a lot better as far as the headphone amp. The preamps are ok, and most will think actor's dialog is just fine, but it think it leaves something to be desired. The display is a bit lame as well.

Score: Preamps 6, A/D Converters 6, Headphone amp: 3, I/O Feautures 6, Display & Level Metering 5, Cost 8 (the cheapest recorder in the pro / prosumer range)

Zoom H4n

Ahhh the little Zoom, which is selling like hot cakes and seems to get rave reviews all over the place. Here is my take on this: The people who are reviewing the Zoom are mostly either consumer hobbyists, tinkerers (meaning they play around but don't do pro work), or they are pro videographers who are used to the poor sound of camcorder mics and lame camcorder preamps. These are the types that think that just because a camera has an XLR input - it has pro sound because you can plug in a pro mic. Almost all the major cameras that everyone uses have pretty crappy on board preamps / sound. Including the XL1, XL2, A1, XH1, HVX200 & HPX170 & Sony EX1. If you are going directly into the camera I would say only the sony Ex1 has an acceptable preamp and headphone out. So for these people, by comparison the Zoom H4n seems fantastic, but if you are coming from the world of pro sound, I do not think it stacks up - BUT, it will work if that's all you can afford.

Can you save a truckload of money and actually do a whole double system sound movie with a good boom mic plugged directly into the Zoom H4n? Yes. It is possible, but so far my experiments with it leave me unsatisfied when comparing it to the sound of the other bigger recorders. I did just complete a short film where I only used the Zoom H4n just to see if it could be done, and everyone kept asking me what it was and the people who did know what it was couldn't believe I was trusting the whole film to just that device. They gave me dirty looks like I was an idiot to do such a thing! I then made up a story that it was a custom modded version and that shut everyone up. It was not. The film was ultra low budget so I wasn't about to rent high end gear for what I was getting paid - the film becmae my guinea pig. I recorded 24bit/48k and played the dailies back to the director the first day. He was more than happy so that's all that matters. I will post the results when it is edited.

Where the Zoom H4n really does shine, and the only reason I may not return it, is that it is a super stereo ambient track & effect recorder. The little built in stereo condenser mics are great for capturing the background
tracks of the scenes you are going to lay your main dialog over. Grab a minute of the nature sounds for your outdoor scenes. Grab a couple minutes of guests having dinner chatter for your restaurant scenes. It is a fantastic recorder for this purpose that produces a great 3D stereo image and it is much better than using your boom to do it because when you lay down these tracks in stereo (or even 4 channels for surround sound mixes) and then you lay down your dialog tracks in mono - it works wonderfully and the dialog really cuts through the mix as it should. The headphone amp is not bad either. You need to crank it up near max... 80 or so, but it is quiet.

Score: Preamps 4.5, A/D Converters 6.5, Headphone amp: 7, I/O Features 8.5 (on board condenser mics a huge plus), Display & Level Metering 6.5 (bright but how do you hold or mount this thing to see it?), Cost 10 (the cheapest recorder with semi pro features)

I know I missed a few recorders like the edirol, but don't use it and I don't see it much.

Hope this helps you guys out who are in the market to get some pro sound and record some films with acting instead of pretty trees cut to music.

Wink Wink.

- Blackout -
 
I'm curious about the numeric ratings for the A/D converters of the various recorders, as separate from the ratings for the preamps. How did you come up with this score? - Tim
 
I am rating them in order of sound quality so I judged them by recording a mic directly into them and then by sending them the same mic from a line level signal from a mixer to see how the a/d colors sound. Really mic & preamp is more important nowadays all the a/d converters do a pretty good job. If you want to get crazy bill nigh the science guy you could send increasingly complex test tones and examine the waveform. But does that really matter? I go by ear.
 
I prefer the Fostex to the SD preamp/AD system. Just my 2 euro cents. The SD has to my ear a slightly artificial sound. The Fostex is easy to mod but out of the box sounds very good, and it works great with both Schoeps and Sennheisers. I wouldn't call any of them top of the line, they don't sound as good as a Grace Lunatec, although the differences are small. I would be surprised if the SD preamps are true Class A, although there was no info that I could find yea or nay. You can also get an RME quadmic and a zoom H2 and have four channels class A for less than $650. One overlooked option is to use the S/PDIF input of the Micro Track with a high quality digital preamp, and this will outperform the SD, Fostex and Zoom, because the recorder is only writing the data stream. Other inexpensive options are the EMU USB (excellent converters and HP jacks) plus a laptop, Focusrite plus laptop, or RME plus laptop. Top of the Line has many contenders from Grace, Mytek, Lavry, and so on.
 
Blackout said:
I am rating them in order of sound quality so I judged them by recording a mic directly into them and then by sending them the same mic from a line level signal from a mixer to see how the a/d colors sound. Really mic & preamp is more important nowadays all the a/d converters do a pretty good job. If you want to get crazy bill nigh the science guy you could send increasingly complex test tones and examine the waveform. But does that really matter? I go by ear.
Click to expand...
You're presuming then, that the line level input on a given device isn't simply a padded-down version of the mic input? I've looked for schematics of the H4n, as I was curious about the input section's design, but haven't found anything.

I asked how you compared these, simply because you chose to rate the various A/D converters (from 6.5 all the way up to 10), and I was curious what metric led to the 35% difference. Now it sounds like you're saying that there may not be that much of a difference after all. What part of this am I not getting?

Additionally, you rated the headphone amplifier relatively high (compared to the rest of the H4n's numbers), which is surprising since even Zoom enthusiasts seem to agree that this is the weak point of the device (the headphone/line out has a rep for being very noisy). Are you hearing quality through the headphone amp that accurately reflects the files on the device?

I love the fact that you have access to this variety of hardware (I'm quite envious of it), and I'd be fascinated to hear recordings made with identical mics, under identical conditions, of identical material (I trust my ears, but not my brain's ability to "remember" sounds for more than a fraction of a second). I'd love to hear that AND read your detailed review, along with the very useful information you provided about UI and feature sets of each.

The mic comparisons that Ty Ford and MattinSTL have posted are enormously valuable because, in addition to their opinions, the videos and wav files provide data that I can analyze for myself, so I can judge if a given device is "better" enough to suit my needs. I'd be very interested in seeing something like that added to your review, since it may help those of us with lower-end gear make better decisions about how big a difference we can expect from a given device, relative to what we're currently using. - Tim "the Fool, not the Science Guy"
 
I'm not sure why folks are acting like the OP knows what he's talking about. Maybe he does but how would one know. His testing seems VERY subjective and just because he put some numbers in there doesn't mean they mean anything. As far as I can tell he has some experience and definitely has an opinion and has possibly worked with but at least borrowed the above equipment for this "test".

I'm not dinging him he calls it a review and comparison, it is. I think it's useful to have some of this here, though it would be better if it covered a few more of the many options. But in terms of the ratings, it's just opinion. And it doesn't sound like an opinion based on much actual work in the field with the units. That puts it on a par with most sound magazine reviews, useful but you really need to take it for what it is.
 
I am rating them in order of sound quality so I judged them by recording a mic directly into them and then by sending them the same mic from a line level signal from a mixer to see how the a/d colors sound.
Click to expand...

And how is that a judge of the A/D? since in both cases you are going through the A/D converters.


I go by ear.
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A valid way to judge IF you explain that. How valid it is for someone other than you however would have a lot to do with how good your ear is. Since we have no way of knowing that it makes it interesting but not intrinsically very useful. It bothers me when opinions are stated in a way that implies that they are more than that. So personally I would have been a lot happier if your post had a bit of a disclaimer/ explanation of how you judged and what the basis for the numbers are.

You say "I have had a good amount of experience on the major recorders out there that you see on film sets big & small ", but you don't have experience with the DEVA which is used on a large percentage of BIG films. Also where's NAGRA, and CANTAR, and FOSTEX (the multitrack professional unit). And your missing a LOT of units used on small and Med sized sets, Marantz, micro-track, Olympus, Tascam, Sony, Roland, etc.
What you have is a very limited review of four units that are sometimes used on documentaries and Very small to micro/no budget narrative films.
 
I just opened this up to give my info and hope others would follow with models they have compared. It was just done over using the same boxes many times and noticing things about them, and testing them together when I had the chance. I am absolutely not the 'authority' on these things and didn't have an absolute scientific test bench going. The numbers were come up with by the difference in sound quality to my ears, and I consider myself to be extremely nitpicky with sound. Others of course will come to different conclusions, so please do and post them! In the boxes I tested above, the sound devices would be my first choice every time, and then down the line, but I have gotten fine resilts on the other recorders. Even the zoom h4n.

Just tried to use the zoom in extreme cold the other day and it did not like it, the sound got weird and I had to reboot the device.
 
Noiz2 said:
And how is that a judge of the A/D? since in both cases you are going through the A/D converters.




A valid way to judge IF you explain that. How valid it is for someone other than you however would have a lot to do with how good your ear is. Since we have no way of knowing that it makes it interesting but not intrinsically very useful. It bothers me when opinions are stated in a way that implies that they are more than that. So personally I would have been a lot happier if your post had a bit of a disclaimer/ explanation of how you judged and what the basis for the numbers are.

You say "I have had a good amount of experience on the major recorders out there that you see on film sets big & small ", but you don't have experience with the DEVA which is used on a large percentage of BIG films. Also where's NAGRA, and CANTAR, and FOSTEX (the multitrack professional unit). And your missing a LOT of units used on small and Med sized sets, Marantz, micro-track, Olympus, Tascam, Sony, Roland, etc.
What you have is a very limited review of four units that are sometimes used on documentaries and Very small to micro/no budget narrative films.
Click to expand...

So are you disagreeing with his ratings on these machines based on personal perspective? I wasn't sure.

Personally I find the technical reviews on these machines to actually be less useful than the opinions of folks in the field. Someone can go on for 12 hours about why the schematics of one machine proves its dominence over another, but in the end if 8 out of 10 people say they prefer working with the GH1 over the Canon 7D, that they feel the GH1 produces a better overall picture and workflow, that review is more useful to me than the schematics on the cameras proving that the 7D is better.

Obviously being able to see and hear tests provide the best results, but second to that, IMO, is professional opinion followed by schematics.
 
I don't personally have enough experience to critique the boxes. The FRLe is the only one I haven't used at least a little, though I did play with the big brother.

He expressed opinions and those are his and that is fine. My problem was a with the ratings with out any explanation of what they were based on (now we know that they were based on his impressions). If a top mixer or someone who's work I know and respect posted their opinions it would be useful but someone with unknown background is well just an opinion. It could be right on the money or it could be a 7 year old having fun with the list. He didn't help his reliability by saying he was familiar with pretty much every recorder used on small to "big" film shoots, and was going to review them for us. And then name four recorders only one of which gets much use on any but the microest of shows and none of which get any use (for production recording) on BIG shows.


Chamber005 said:
So are you disagreeing with his ratings on these machines based on personal perspective? I wasn't sure.

Personally I find the technical reviews on these machines to actually be less useful than the opinions of folks in the field. Someone can go on for 12 hours about why the schematics of one machine proves its dominence over another, but in the end if 8 out of 10 people say they prefer working with the GH1 over the Canon 7D, that they feel the GH1 produces a better overall picture and workflow, that review is more useful to me than the schematics on the cameras proving that the 7D is better.

Obviously being able to see and hear tests provide the best results, but second to that, IMO, is professional opinion followed by schematics.
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Keeping it cool.

I believe the OP was using the SD700 series as the baseline. While there are LOTS of other recorder units out in the market like what Noiz2 had mentioned, the title of the thread is misleading.

Out of the four recorders reviewed I would have placed them in the same exact order, but with the rating score having a smaller diference. Whenever I use the 788T, I use it for TC, multitrack, and portable preamps. I pull my handy Zoom H4 (3 years owned) for simple two track recording with a good mixer/preamp in front. The FR2 has better features compared to the H4, but too bulky. The HDP2 is just right with the size and features, but it only records to two tracks.

"I go by ear"
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This is true, but it's really down to your engineering skills and how you use it. I know this music director who have a very good ear for things, but when it gets down to using certain types of equipments he wouldn't have a clue and trusts me in that decision-making part. He can hear a noticeable difference between the Zoom H4 and the 788T, but the H4 lacks in amount of inputs for music multi-tracking. Often times I would just mix all the elements down the mixing console and out to a two-track recorder. It's based on what you need than what you can or cannot hear. We use our ears all the time in audio-related situations, but it is how you use your ears that counts the most.
 
I agree Zoom H4N is good for ambiences, effects... but indeed not for dialogues on "front".

The dog barking in the back that not anyone notices... but when it's not there everyone "misses" something... can be recorder with a H4N
 
Sorry, I have to agree with Alan. The title for this thread is completely misleading. If you're not reviewing the Cantar and the Deva and Metacorder and Boom Recorder, you're not reviewing the major recorders. As a matter of fact, other than the SD recorders, I would class the rest as mid-range to minor recorders. I might class the new Tascam as a major, but I haven't seen any credible hands-on reviews of it yet.

Phil
 
ptalsky said:
Sorry, I have to agree with Alan. The title for this thread is completely misleading. If you're not reviewing the Cantar and the Deva and Metacorder and Boom Recorder, you're not reviewing the major recorders. As a matter of fact, other than the SD recorders, I would class the rest as mid-range to minor recorders. I might class the new Tascam as a major, but I haven't seen any credible hands-on reviews of it yet.

Phil
Click to expand...

Agreed, and add the Nagra VI to the list of majors.
 
raphb said:
I'd love for you to rate the Marantz PMD 661 Oade Brothers Super MOD :-)
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I have a Marantz PMD 661 Oade Brothers Super MOD. Bought it when the noise floor on the H4n drove me crazy. The Oade is much much better, less noise. But that is in manual mode. Running it in auto level increases the noise floor to almost h4n levels. Perhaps there is a trick I missed, just got the unit. Still it is very very good.
 
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