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little Tascam single-channel recorder (DR-10X)

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DSatz:
Hi. Just in case anyone's interested: I will have a live recording situation later this week for which I'll need to place two spot mikes in hard-to-reach locations. Running cables from those mikes to my recording position, or even to a separate two-channel recorder of their own, would be unsightly, dangerous and time-consuming--so I plan to attach a miniature single-channel recorder to each microphone, and sync everything up afterward to the tracks from the main recorder. If the tracks from the spot mikes need time stretching or squeezing to sync up and stay "sunc", so be it.

The two recorders that I looked at were the Tascam DR-10X and something called the Saramonic SR-VRM1 (which I'd never heard of before). Both are in the $100-$125 range. Each has a balanced, XLR-3F mike-level input, and records just a single channel of audio.

The "Saramonic" recorder has built-in phantom powering, so I considered it first. I went to a store (Adorama, not far from Union Square in Manhattan) that had one that I could look at. The salesperson graciously allowed me to install batteries, power it up, and attach a Schoeps PHS 48 phantom power tester that I'd brought along. Sorry to say, the indicator LED on the tester didn't light up. I can only assume that the current draw was too much for the phantom supply circuit in the recorder. So, while that recorder had several advantages (a metal housing, finer control over level setting, and quite possibly a quieter preamp), I let it go and bought a Tascam DR-10X instead; I'll pick up the second one tomorrow.

The Tascam DR-10X is surprisingly small--only slightly bigger than a small bottle of hand sanitizer. But it was clearly designed for dynamic rather than (professional) condenser microphones. It lacks phantom powering, and an input of just 2.5 mV drives it to 0 dBFS at the lowest of its three available microphone gain settings. Professional condenser microphones often put out 40 mV or more for loud sounds, so I will have to "pad down" the input by at least 10 dB.

The recorder doesn't have any finer adjustment for its record levels than three discrete "LO/MID/HI" mike gain settings that are some 6 to 10 dB apart from one another--and those settings are made via menu items that can't be accessed while the recorder is recording. So that isn't a very wonderful arrangement. But its coarseness is compensated in part by the recorder's ability to record a second, "safety" track either 6 dB or 12 dB below the level of the main track. Again, that isn't useful if overload is occurring at the input of the preamp stage of the recorder; then you would only be recording your distorted signal at a lower level. But if there's enough resistive padding between the phantom power supply and the recorder's input, it should work.

(please note correction at end of paragraph) The recorder has 24-bit recording as a menu option--in fact, it's the default setting. But even at the lowest gain setting, the built-in mike preamp has a noise floor about 72 dB below full scale, i.e. only about 12 bits of actual resolution. (Of course that is as good as the best 15 or 30 ips analog open-reel recorder ever was--but nowadays we are spoiled.) So I set it for 16-bit rather than 24-bit recording. I made test recordings both ways, and the setting made no observable difference at all to the noise floor of the recording--even on the secondary track that was 12 dB lower. Correction added next day: A better way of reporting the same result would be to call it a nearly-80 dB dynamic range (based on RMS levels of signal and noise); the conclusion re: 16 vs. 24 bits is still the same, though.

The recorder runs on a single alkaline AAA cell for up to 10 hours. It has a low-cut filter at 120 Hz (slope not stated, and I didn't measure it) and optional settings for automatic level control and/or a limiter (neither of which I tried).

After I've had a night's sleep, I'll see what the dynamic range situation is when the recorder is set for what amounts to a line-in situation, which I could use by substituting Sound Devices MP-1 preamps for the battery-run phantom power supplies that I was going to use. According to the specs in the manual, that might give a quieter result; I doubt that it will be drastically different, but I'll see.

--best regards

jerryfreak:
how about the single channel lectrosonics pdr+schoeps cmr

Sebastian:
I'm a little confused. You didn't get the Saramonic that "had several advantages" because its phantom power supply wasn't up to spec. Instead, you got the Tascam that does not even have phantom power. May I ask why you made that decision?

Ozpeter:
Come to think of it, that's a good question!  As for the phantom power - you did turn it on in the menu?  (Item 7) - ok, ok, just asking...

morst:

--- Quote from: jerryfreak on November 26, 2018, 12:44:00 AM ---how about the single channel lectrosonics pdr+schoeps cmr

--- End quote ---
Wireless might be even more hassle, and is probably more costly than a couple of cheap Trashcan recorders.


But it WOULD save the squash/stretch part of editing, as long as signal reaches its destination.


I guess it depends on how radio frequencies carry in the venue, and how many wireless signals are already present.

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