In another yahoo groups "micbuilders" a guy has got his fingers on R-1 and reports his findings, which makes me mixed-feeling about live-concert-taping-quality of the device (esp in loud concert envirnoments) ...
see:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/micbuilders/message/3113 (hope discussion of R-1 continues here and there
))
Cut ´n´paste for reader´s convenience (hope that´s ok with everybody):
From: Mike Feldman <mike_feldman@s...>
Date: Thu Dec 23, 2004 9:19 pm
Subject: Edirol R-1
Got R-1 two days ago; has impressive and disappointing features.
First impressions...
Made for recording -- more expensive than consumer "playback" devices,
but cheaper than "pro" recording devices. Bigger than an MD, D8, M1;
smaller than the Marantz and Fostex flash recorders.
Case is cheap plastic with not the greatest fit-n-finish;
mine is already scratched up, and I have trouble working
the compact flash door. It does come with a nice pouch
that doubles as a shock-pad for table-top recording. But
don't drop this puppy. Switched, volume wheels and jog wheel
are all cheap feeling. Display is adequate and has lowintensity
red backlight (good), and contrast control allows various viewing
angles. Record button lights orange steady while recording.
Power via 2 AAs or 3vdc 1A wall wart, so p-i-p and analog rails
are 2V, which is limiting. I ran it OK on NiMH 2050mAHr cells.
It has an on-off switch that works.
Outputs - just one phones jack, and it's too close to the output
volume control, which makes it easy to find and hard to used.
It does have an optical digital-out combo on the headphone jack.
Inputs - miniplug, but the mic in has switchable plug-in-power;
no digital in, so external A/D is useless. Would have preferred
digital in to digital out, since USB out is way to go.
USB - it is a high-speed mass storage device, and MacOS 10.3.7
has no problem mounting it as "NO NAME" volume. The R-1 doesn't
power itself from the USB cable, but when USB power is available
the R-1 stops being a recorder and disables all buttons.
They recommend using the wall-wart in USB mode so I'm guessing
their powersaving modes are disabled and will drain the batteries
quickly. But it's plenty fast for moving audio files in either
direction and I can even rename recorded files or edit them
in-place from the compute, where it's easier to type than to
use the jog-wheel file rename interface. And it even displays
long filenames, although it has to scroll them.
The R-1 also works OK with older USB 1.1 full-speed interfaces,
although it, like other USB devices buts heads with other devices
(eg. my Canon 960i printer) through my Sony monitor's USB hub.
Of course, copies are slower.
Ironically, iTunes 4 refueses to import either it's .WAV or
.MP3 files directly, although if you copy them, it's OK.
I was able to copy iTunes mp3 and wav files to the R-1, and
it plays them fine. Actually sounds as good as I remember
most portable players sounding -- haven't done an A-B yet
with listening.
Features... record startup is moderately fast, but it
doesn't have manual track split. It does have auto
split on silence, but I haven't tried that yet. File
naming is serviceable, but I wish it had date and time
encoded. There is no creation date on the files I copied
to the Mac, and the modify date was Jan 1, 2002. Yuck.
Record display toggles through time, time remaining (at
that bit-depth on flash card), and input level meter,
which is mono, slow, has no peak hold, and is totally
inadequate. Hopefully a future firmware upgrade will
fix this. And it's got a bunch of DSP effects,
1/2 speed playback, and looping playback between
start & stop points ... what a waste of programming
effort when they could have nailed the meter instead.
The built-in mics, while good for voice and
acoustic music, were no match for a live band.
The waveforms are all saturated at a level
well below digital full scale, and the clipping
follows in the input level control. That tells
me that something upstream of the level control,
either the built-in microphones or the mic preamps
didn't have the headroom for the soundlevels.
I didn't bring my SPL meter, but I'd guess about 105 dB.
The results aren't as harsh as digital
clipping, but are annoyingly distorted
on all the mid- and high-level passages.
Next up is to see how it does with a better
set of mics and with an external preamp
feeding line-in.
Anyone who likes to contribute to discussion of edirol r-1 is gladly welcome ....
Thanx
Topic: R1 First Impressions (Read 9250 times)