Topic: Deva II maiden voyage (thoughts/review)

[wbrisette]

Due to a screw-up, the Deva II unit I ordered went from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast, then to me in Texas. That meant I didn't get any real time to play with it before deciding to try it out at Railroad Earth last night. Because it was totally new and I have NOT had good luck the first couple of times I've used a new piece of gear (we've all been there), I decided to only use it as a backup. I used my standard setup:

Earthworks QTC1 -------- EW SR77/EW SR77 ---------  EW QTC1
All 4 To
Wendt X4 --> AD2K+

Then the unbalanced SPDIF went to the DA-P1 and the AES digital went to the Deva II.

I didn't change the format of the digital signal and I'm going to have to find out from Zaxcom if using the SPDIF format instead of AES has any real issues with the Deva (It didn't complain last night, so I'm guessing it will use both the pro and consumer format).

Setting up the deva is a pain. Actually it will be fine once I figure out where they bury some of the options. Every button seems to have multiple functions depending on what key combinations are used and the manual is a bit skimpy on a lot of the details.

Overall, the setup seemed to work fine. Deva uses it's own drive format and partitions the drive into 4 GB sections whenever record is pushed. The amount of time you get depends on how many channels you select for recording (you get either 1 channel, 2 channels, or 4 channels -- You can't have a 3 channel recording). It only records at 48 Khz (or some film variations 47xxx) and it's always 24 bits. Not option of using 16-bits. This means it's about 33 MB per minute when recording.

Fozzy mentioned to me that it's smaller than he thought it would be. It's definitely bigger than the 744 will be, but it's a different beast, and it's not much bigger than the AD2K+ (it's taller. If you stacked 2 AD2K's on top of each other that's about the size).

Since last night was only a backup, it's hard to say what the unit really sounds like -- it sounds like my tapes. ;-)

Anyhow, once I use the mic inputs and get a handle on using the unit, I'll post some samples, then people can do some comparisons to the 722/744 samples that are out there.

Wayne

[Brian Skalinder]

Wayne - thanks for the write-up, looking forward to hearing more as you gain more experience and run it as your primary setup!

[Ed.]

is that thing really $10k

[wbrisette]

is that thing really $10k

It was. Zaxcom has a few of these that they took back from folks as part of their trade-up program (from the Deva II to the Deva IV, or V). They are selling these for 5K now.

Wayne