One of my clients brought in an Edirol R-1 for me to examine today.
We learned some things about it.
It uses the same compact flash cards that my Canon camera uses. The
flash card door feels like it will break. The ejector button doesn't
eject the card far enough to grab it easily.
Record time is two hours with alkalines, making it a power hog
compared to MDs. They warn not to feed it dirty power, like the
output of an inverter.
The internal mics sound good, no motor to pick up.
The meter is pretty bad. It seems to have a delay before the reading.
I put a strip of white tape below it and marked some levels. -5 dBFS
is about the middle! -10 1/4 from the left, -22 the first segment.
There's no calibration on the little side-wheel record level control.
I suggested putting dots of different colors of nail polish on it so
a setting could be repeated.
When you pause, the take number/file name doesn't change.
When "input monitor" is set to on, you can hear what you're preparing
to record. But if you leave it on, the mics will mix with the
playback. Clearly the designers have no experience with field
recording.
We compared one channel of the R-1 to one channel of my Sharp MD-MT90
with a pair of 183 mics next to each other. We looked at the
level-matched outputs of record-pause (no actual recording) on a
Spectrafoo spectrum analyzer. The Edirol has wider bandwidth at both
the top and the bottom. About 6 dB higher response at 16Hz, about 3dB
higher at the top end. They matched between 60 Hz and around 8 KHz.
The noise levels seemed to be about the same.
-Dan Dugan
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