Gig report -
Well, my DR-22WL has had its first serious outing and acquitted itself well.
The venue was a small jazz club - say 150 people size - and as someone else was doing a "proper" recording, I kept my profile low and simply placed the recorder on someone's drinks table near the front of the stage, using a mini photo tripod, and sat the usb power supply beside it. The recorder is so light that I should have taken alongside some blutak to ensure the tripod stayed in place, though in fact it didn't move. I simply turned on the recorder, pressed the wifi button, and then positioned myself further back in the room, at a suitable point to get a good view on my video camera (it was a busy night!).
During the first item it was easy to adjust the level from my phone - somewhat too high to begin with - I ended up with it at about 30 (where 90 = max). Then I left it alone but periodically checked that the phone was still receiving time and level info (no problem) and that the set level was still correct. I stopped the transport from the phone at the start of the interval, and restarted it for the second half, all without having to disturb the people at the table by fiddling with the recorder (which would have put handling noises on the recording too).
All in all, I came away with the feeling that this is a pretty ideal way of doing this kind of recording. I've seen the future and it's wifi.
I've posted a sample track on Soundcloud -
https://soundcloud.com/ozpeter/part-2-item-1 which hopefully will work - I'm not very familiar with Soundcloud.
Now this isn't straight from the recorder. Personally, everything I do is going to go through at least minimal post-production, and what counts is the end result, not what I started with, which while being no disaster wasn't perfect. As before, there's no doubt that the sound straight from the recorder has a "veiled" quality, lacking in high frequency sparkle. But there's no problem at the bottom end. So for Soundcloud, I added a little eq at the top end (+3dB at 5300Hz, 3 octave bandwidth), and as the trombone was a bit "in your face" I reduced the "mid" component of the stereo image by about 4dB, which has the effect of widening the image somewhat and reducing the centre level. Noise levels (self noise) were just fine - I can't hear anything wrong in that department.
The end result is something which to my ear sounds very close to what I heard with my own ears on the night. I'm pretty pleased.