Topic: Tascam DR-05x Settings for Recording Rock Concerts

[sbansban]

I am a new user of a Tascam DR-05x and set it up partly using the manual and partly by reading stuff online. I used it once for the first time in 2023 as a back up to my recordings of street music and the quality was not a whole lot better (usually worse) than my very capable cameras like SONY ZV-E10 and Panasonic FZ1000 - even my Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra - all of which I use regularly for video. After that it was sitting unused for more than a year before I dusted it off and wanted to use it as an audio back up again for my videos of a rock concert at a large stadium. Once again, the recording is at best no better than what the cameras recorded (well, may be marginally better than the worst audio from my P1000 camera, which I could have improved with an external mic attached to the P1000 camera), and at worst crappy.

I did not used any accessory external input mic, attenuator etc. etc. - just a wind muff I purchased here:

One Amazon reviewer some of whose settings I used (in quotes below)  said "The recording quality is great. I record in 24-bit PCM mode, and just set the recording volume to 48 and forget it. It's low enough that even the loudest sounds won't peak the recording, and high enough that even the quietest sounds the microphone can detect are a mile above the noise floor of the ADC. So I can just record without worry and then, later on a PC, try to get the volume level perfect. "

I mostly used default values for the settings and tweaked just a few of them. Not remembering exactly which settings I changed, here are the main ones I used at the aforementioned rock concert:  wav format, 24 bit, sample 48k, type stereo, size 2G (default, I believe), Mic Power off, low cut 40Hz, Auto Tone off, Tone Vol -18db (if this is the input level, then I did make changes intermittently during recording, so this may be the last value I used). Mode off, level -12dB (again, if this is the input level, then I did make changes intermittently during recording, so this may be the last value I used), level mode (I believe I had set this to manual and kept an eye on the peak light and adjusted it down when it was red or flashing red intermittently - but then I had to reduce it to such a low value that I was afraid the resulting audio would be so faint that I would not be able to use it at all).

Other settings: Speaker On, Play Eq off, Level align off.

All other settings at default.

Could someone please tell me what, if any settings changes  (or any other changes) I could make that might enable decent audio recording with this device?

[Rairun]

If your levels are OK (not clipping NOR plagued by the recorder's self-noise), and the DR-05X is recording from a very similar position to your camera's, then I'm afraid you just don't like how the internal microphones sound. There isn't much you can do about it.

But I'm assuming you aren't doing anything like leaving the recorder in your pocket, pointing away from the sound source, etc. You need to get the settings right so you won't completely ruin the recording, but no settings will save you if the microphones aren't placed somewhere with good sound.

[sbansban]

Thanks for your response. No - my DR-05x was strategically placed pointed to the stage. So You don't think anything was wrong with my settings?

[Rairun]

I don't think so. If you want to post a couple of samples to illustrate the difference between the Tascam and the cameras, feel free! There's a chance that what you're perceiving is not so much a difference in quality but in loudness - depending on the camera settings, there might be some compression/limiting going on, which would make the overall sound louder. And when asked to compare two recordings, human beings tend to pick the loudest as the best sounding one (you'd need to adjust the volume so they are the same to really compare).

I find the Zoom H1's internal mics marginally better than the Sony a6500 internal mics, on a good day. When it comes down to it, there's a reason people here almost never use any internal mics. Back in the day, it made sense to use a dedicated recorder's internal mics over the camera's (specially when recording loud music, since camera mics just couldn't handle the high SPL). But nowadays, phone and camera mics are more or less on pair with the internal mics of dedicated recorders. If you want to hear a difference, you might have to use external mics.