Got a DR-60D last week and took it out almost immediately to record Cowboy Junkies at City Winery in NYC. Haven't given a critical listen to the results yet, but a casual listen left me with a decent impression of the sound and I'm pretty happy with it. Then again, I had my mics in a nice spot and CW is a wonderful sounding room. Hope to have some time this weekend to mix it down and post it next week. Some initial observations and thoughts...
* Overall feel and build quality:
It's more or less all plastic but it seems to have a fairly solid feel and heft to it. Switches and buttons have a positive click to them, gain pots turn smoothly. Really like that the 1&2 channel inputs are XLR/TRS combo and the XLRs lock, unlike those on the Roland R-26. Even though it's different than most of the recorders we're used to using, I personally like the form factor. Whoever said that it's about the size of a 4-stick/1-pound pack of butter is pretty spot on. And yes, the top camera mount and front-face bars are all removable to reduce size, but those front bars help protect the face of the recorder so I'd be leery to take them off. I'm used to Edirol/Roland recorders which I find very intuitive to use and the DR-60D is not terrifically different, IMO. However, the menu system is a little more extensive than I'm used to, and I question the need for subfolders for some of the menu choices.
* Runtime:
Haven't really tested it thoroughly but can tell you my field results from one night. As obaaron pointed out, this deck seems to chew through power. Had 4 freshly and fully charged Eneloop 2000 mAh AA batteries in the compartment, and a freshly and fully charged 3000 mAh cell phone external battery connected to it. After 2 hours 45 minutes where the DR-60D was on the entire time in 2-channel mode with phantom power on both channels (running Milab VM-44 Links) and either recording or in standby, the external battery was out of juice, the deck had automatically switched to internal power and the meter was down to 2 out of 4 bars. I recently picked up a
Tekkeon MP3300, bought a USB adaptaplug for the cable and it works perfectly. Will test this for runtime at some point and post the results here.
* What I'm not crazy about:
- Gain pots are just a hair too small for my liking and wish they were ridged instead of smooth on the sides for better grip. I also wish they had a bit more resistance or even stepped clicks like the R-44.
- Headphone output is definitely noisy and strictly to be used for monitoring. I wouldn't patch out of it, but I guess that's what the Line Out jack is for.
- Level meter has no reference except for an arrow at the -14 dB point; that's an odd level to mark, too. The tiny lines they have at the dB steps are a bit too small to use effectively. What's nice is there's a single readout in decibels which tells you the overall peak but one for each channel would have been better. Then again, you're limited by the size of the display screen which isn't that large.
* What would be nice:
- A way to stereo link the gain pots on channels 1 and 2 so that they could both be controlled by one pot (a la Sound Devices MixPre-D). I think I read that the gain pots work in the digital realm so maybe this could be accomplished with a firmware update?
- A S/PDIF digital-in (and digi-out, if we're going for broke) would be ideal on this deck.
For $200 and with phantom-powered XLRs, this deck is a keeper in my gear chest unless we find something drastically wrong with it. Really looking forward to testing and recording more shows with this recorder.
Topic: Tascam DR-60D - 4 Channel recorder (Read 112886 times)