At 07:28 AM 5/26/2005 +0000, Ralph Paonessa wrote:
>Any comments on the Marantz PMD660 vs. Sony MZ-RH10 for bird
>recording? I've read all I could find on the net, but as an audio
>novice I'm not sure what to make of it. I guess the PMD660 is fairly
>new, there were some complaints that the mic preamp wasn't good,
>Marantz has stated some bad units went out initially. My biggest
>concern, however, is that this unit seems aimed at "voice
>recording," whereas I'm interested in bird calls. Should I be
>concerned about things like frequency response, etc.?
>
>People use phases like "fabulous sound fidelity" to describe Hi-MD
>devices and Sony MZ-RH10.
Most of the time "voice recording" in advertising lit means low-fi, as
in a $30 cassette recorder. Not in this case. I can't say just *how* good the
PMD660 is, but I would think the mic is more limiting than the recorder. In
olden days you could buy a Marantz cassette recorder that had been tweaked for
recording birds; I believe some high frequency responses were boosted a bit.
Today just about any mini-disc recorder has all the bandwidth a bird-recorder
needs, and good solid-state recorders do too, without the high noise floor of a
cassette unit.
As a non-user of the PMD660 I can't speak to its preamp problems, if
any.
-- Chuck
PS: I have seen a birding guide use a $30 cassette recorder and cheap
dynamic mic to record and call in birds. What we're talking about here is what
kind of system will make *us* happy. To each his own.
========
Chuck Bragg, Pacific Palisades, CA
Membership, Newsletter, Web manager
Santa Monica Bay Audubon Society
www.smbas.org
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