Topic: R1 First Impressions

[liverecording2004]

I just wanted to let you know that over at oade-tapers-forum Doug Oade has got his hands on one of these units and has already published his first impressions ...

see:
http://www.oade.com/Tapers_Section/Forum/dcboard.php?
az=show_mesg&forum=100&topic_id=2278&mesg_id=2278&page=

we are looking foreward to his ongoing test-sessions, ´cause we´re all curious if this thing proves to be a reliable DAT-quality taping gear ... are we?

By the way, has anyone else (I know that the bunch of you can be dubbed very-early-adopters) had the chance to test the R1 in a live taping environment ... any insights highly appreciated ..

Thank you all for keeping this forum a tapers-haven (or should I say heaven?)

 

[Popmarter]

Thanks for pointing!

[Weazel]

some folks on http://www.thetradersden.org/ use it for stealthing.

[nickgregory]

interesting, one of the mods that Doug is talking about is adding a digi input...

[Popmarter]

cut/paste from oade site:

"i`ve tested the edirol r-1 with a 4gb cf and it works, will be fully recognized by the edirol. the problem is the 2gb wav limitation, when you record and it passes the 2gb limit it just stops and you get a 0byte file (current edirol r-1 firmware version 1.02), so you need to stop manually the record after about 120 mins.

bummer?

[EA]

cut/paste from oade site:

"i`ve tested the edirol r-1 with a 4gb cf and it works, will be fully recognized by the edirol. the problem is the 2gb wav limitation, when you record and it passes the 2gb limit it just stops and you get a 0byte file (current edirol r-1 firmware version 1.02), so you need to stop manually the record after about 120 mins.

bummer?

I don't see that as being all that big of a deal. You just have to find a point to stop it and restart it sometime near 120 mins. Certainly not as much of a pain as swapping out a DAT if you use 60 meter DAT tapes. I'd assume that the down time wouldn't be more than a matter of a few seconds. The digital input mod sounds interesting. That's really about the only thing lacking in this to make it a really viable field recorder. And really even that may not be that big of a deal to many people. I've not heard any reviews of the internal A/D. But I'd assume it's similar to the A/D in the UA-5 (which people seem to like). So, it may be fine going analog in if you're using a quality pre like a V2 or a sax or MP2. It'll be interesting to see what Doug comes up with for mods though (and how much extra it adds to the price tag).

[liverecording2004]

Hey,

over in one of yahoo.groups dubbed "laptop-tapers" a guy from sweden has his hands on the R1 and also has reported some of his findings (which for convenience I´ll cut´n´paste into this thread - hope that´s ok for everybody ++ any more infos about R1 would be greatly appreciated!) as follows :

Hello Anders! Please report your findings about the R-1 (preferabely
> usage in a live concert recording environment) ... I hope it provides
> overall stability and (better than?) DAT Sound Quality ...

i am only doing field recordings and 'phonography' so i can't say how
it works inlive concert situations

some impressions:

i live in Sweden and it's winter and snow here but the r-1 the works
perfectly outside i cold weather, no increased battery-consumption (as
opposite to my old md-recorder)

battery-life: 2 hours

the r-1 works well for me. it's stabile so far and the sound quality is
superb, pure transfer of files to the computer. the major drawback is
the weak construction - made in plastic. i have already scratch marks
on it.

more later

best,

(though it's sad times here in sweden. over 2900 swedish citizens that
where on holidays in thailand are missing after the tsunami wave, most
of them prosumably dead)

anders
 

[rerem]

seems you could carry several flash cards,pop em in+out like changing tapes between sets-while the Flash card adds to the cost-it is reusable relative to DAT-Minidisc and the no moving parts is a plus in terms of reliability

[liverecording2004]

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

[wbrisette]

Mike's report is very similar to what Klay Anderson told me about it after having used it for a bit. Overall though for the cost, Klay seems to think it's a good piece of gear.

Personally I see the R-1 replacing a lot of the MD out there and some of the DAT recorders.

Wayne

[weed2k]

i got the edirol r-1 and its a nice device, but youre right with your cons, especially the low level meter. what firmware does your r-1 has? i guess edirol will fix all the "problems". i want automatic track splitting when it passes the 2gb wav limit..etc

[silentmark]

interesting, one of the mods that Doug is talking about is adding a digi input...

This is why I haven't really researched more about this device, although I am still curious what it's internal ad sounds like ...

[pfife]

interesting, one of the mods that Doug is talking about is adding a digi input...

This is why I haven't really researched more about this device, although I am still curious what it's internal ad sounds like ...

Me too.  as of right now, it doesn't seem any more useful than a Jukebox3.  In fact, it seems less useful, since it uses CF and not a 40gb hd.

I'd love to see this thing mod'd for a digi input, but I am not sure that's going to be coming from Oade any time soon.

[silentmark]

I just listened to Oade's internal mic sample (Mule's Samething), now granted it was through my PC speakers, but man, this not too bad. This little device has some serious potential.

Biggest faults I can see (which have already been mentioned) are the lack of digital input, the placement of level control wheel/knob/whatever and the 2g file limit, which is not that big a deal.

For the price of 4-500 bucks, you really can go wrong at this stage ...

[pfife]

Well, a lot of people do trust edirol's A/D converters in the UA-5, so its probably not bad!