whats better than 4 track recorders........ ah yes..... 6 track recorders.
damn the specs on that look sweet.
to bad its gonna cost like 10 G's.
The Deva 16 will be a 16-track recorder.
You have to understand that Zaxcom, Aaton, Sound Devices, and Nagra are going after markets other than music. The reason they are starting to increase the channels has to do with wireless microphones. While the boom operator isn't dead, on set you're starting to see every actor wired with a mic. All the channels are recorded and mixed on set for the camera, but the main 24-bit media is shipped to post production where they are replacing the field mix.
None of the recorders are cheap, but twice now recording all the dialog has saved my bacon when filming. Recently I did a shoot for a documentary being done for National Geographic and for some reason the audio being fed into the camera had issues. However, they were able to sync it up properly from the audio I provided them from the Deva. I had a similar issue on an indie shoot here in town. It sounded fine on the camera, but playing it back it was not. Again, having it on disk made replacing the audio a snap.
Wayne