Portable Audio Recorder with optical input?

[Sherwood]

Hi,

I am looking for a high quality audio recorder (preferably better than or equal to 24/96 quality). Ideally, I am looking for a device that has an spdif optical input. I know Sony and Marantz used to produce such units at around 600 quid. Is anyone aware of any more recent units at a more affordable price level?

On a general note, there seems to be fewer products with optical inputs/outputs than 10 years ago. I now regret selling a Sony Discman with optical out as it would have given me the flexibility to play the odd cd through my current digital streaming system.

Thanks for any info ....

[robtweed]

This might be a good place to look

http://taperssection.com/index.php?board=11.0

[struth]

I think the Sony PCM-D100 recorder has optical spidf in and out. Only one i can think of, but you,d need to check.. Not cheap though

[Sherwood]

Yes, the Sony PCM-D100 does have the optical input but at 600 quid I think it is a little overpriced, and somewhat dated now too.

thanks anyway.

[Yomanze]

First off, 24/96 is nothing to do with quality, it's just the bit depth and sampling rate. It will give you more recording headroom though, but at a lot of expense... At an affordable price level, and a slight performance hit due to MiniDisc compression, there are loads of great Sony devices out that that do sound good & are affordable. I love the format, plenty rugged & portable & the players have a lot of features like optical ins / outs.

You might also want to consider the many portable DAT players out there, the Sony and TASCAM ones are nice.

[Stratmangler]

The Tascam field recorders are rather good, using SD card for storage.
Their DR-100mkII is a well specified piece of kit, and a doddle to use. It has SPDIF coax input capability http://tascam.com/product/dr-100mkii/

As Neil said, 24/96 is no indicator of quality.
If you're transferring a dodgy old analogue recording to digital the recording is still going to sound like a dodgy old recording http://aixrecords.com/articles/article_2.html
I nearly wet myself when I saw this purporting to be a high resolution recording, as though the numbers reveal something more http://www.hdtracks.co.uk/rocket-to-russia-161133 - it was a grungy sounding low resolution recording when it was released, and that hasn't changed despite the 24/192 transfer.
I suspect that The Ramones are all spinning in their respective graves at having been given the "audiophile" treatment - missing the point doesn't cover it

[Barry]

http://aixrecords.com/articles/article_2.html

As a Nagra IV-S user, I found that article to be of great interest. Thanks Chris.

[Sherwood]

Thanks for the suggestions and advice. Yes, I realize that bit rate is not the sole determinant of recording quality, but it is the key parameter for my situation.

After working overseas for the best part of two decades I have now unpacked my very large vinyl collection and hardware from long-term storage. Although I have replaced much of my vinyl collection over the years with cds, there are many titles which either never made it to cd, are no longer available on cd, or were very badly transferred to digital. Having had my Linn Sondek upgraded with new power supply, arm-board etc, I intend to transfer some of my vinyl to FLAC files. This will allow me to access them "on the road" once I resume my overseas work. Although I have a high quality phono preamp (EAR 834p) I have recently bought a digital phono preamp so that I can streamline the ripping process. I know that I can use my PC to save the files to WAV or FLAC format but for various reasons I would rather simply save them to a portable recorder. My digital phono preamp allows for very high bit rate sampling so I would prefer to go for the highest rate prior to FLAC conversion.

I should clarify that I do not need a device with microphones as I will be recording D to D without analogue conversion, though most devices of this kind seem to come with microphones as standard.

Yes I am aware of MiniDisc and in fact have 2 such devices as well as boxes of blank discs. However, I disagree about the quality of this format, even in its later versions: it always sounded brittle and metallic to me. I agree it was very flexible in its interfaces and i still cannot understand why optical in/out seems to have lost favour with manufacturers, but it is too low-fi for my needs.

Geoff

[lovejoy]

I can vouch for the Tascam portable recorders. That DR-100MK2 looks like a great bit of kit. I've had a DR-05 for a couple of years that I picked up for about £80 from Richer sounds. That doesn't have a digital input so I've been using the pre-out from my Dynavector L300 to go into the line input of the DR-05, record to WAV at 24/96 then edit and down-convert to standard FLAC in Audacity. I have to admit this way of doing things is a little time consuming but then you'll always need to do some amount of post-editing for things like tagging etc. for each file, so I don't think it adds much in the way of inconvenience. As long as the results are good you only ever need do it once, and the results from the DR-05 are excellent. I've done a good few recordings that are easily as enjoyable as the best digital audio files I have.

[robtweed]

I picked up one of these beauties second hand - OK it's an interface rather than a recorder per se, but the Sound Devices pedigree is well respected, and its range of inputs and outputs adds up to a very flexible and extremely high quality device. ..and it's built like a tank!

http://www.sounddevices.com/products...-tools/usbpre2