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Gear / Technical Help => Recording Gear => Topic started by: floete on October 30, 2006, 07:40:20 AM
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the real world is a far different place than a designer's lab, because in the real world, with real people at the controls, anything that can go wrong will go wrong at some point. i don't know how your basic portable cassette recorder controls evolved but they're close to perfect at this point, given that push-button controls offer a tactile understanding of what's going on in addition to the visual. the only issues i've found are with the crappy add-ons, like VOR and tape-speed doubling. a nervous unconscious hand in the middle of a tense situation can easily fiddle with those *slide* switches and mess you up. but there's an easy solution: put tape over 'em. voila, problem solved.
up until recently i loved the edirol r-09. but i'm a reporter who often finds myself in tense situations where my idle hands can easily become the devil's playthings and that was recently the case -- i returned home after recording some MIGHTY interesting and strange things said by a one-time presidential candidate only to find that i'd somehow turned the mike levels down to absolute zero. IOW, when I opened the recording up in cool edit pro what i saw on the screen was a flat line. let me tell you i went right out and got drunk.
i don't know how i did it, and i know it was my fault, but my point is, designers should take f***-ups like me into account when they design these devices. in this case, how? for one thing, if I could use AGC, I would, but with the edirol it's absolutely useless -- far worse than any tape recorder i've ever used. so i'm forced to go with manual level setting. okay. there's that. then the problem becomes, i think, that if you're gripping the device solidly, there's a good chance that your fingers might land right on the input-level buttons and start changing the settings. or maybe i was searching for the power button and hit those other buttons instead. in any event, even knowing these things now, there's no way to prevent problems in the future: you can't tape over the controls to keep them in place. i know the thing has visual meters but in a heated situation, can you really be keeping a conscious eye on them all the time?
I could turn the HOLD function on. And I mostly do that. But there are times when I need to be able to pause the recording instantly or turn it off completely and you can't do that with HOLD on.
This raises another real world issue: there's no way to *positively* know when record is on and when its off without looking at the device. On a tape recorder, you can feel if the button is down or not but with the edirol you have to actually look at it and in stealthy situations that's a real drag. Plus, when you're going into record mode you actually have to press the record button twice, which is not the way people are used to turning things on; it goes against everything we've learned since birth, i think.
I've got other issues with the thing, too. for one: the hold button is so flat to the surface that it's both hard to move and hard to know if it's been moved.
there is a solution, of course, and that's to give the device the same functions in the same control layout as the plainest of portable cassette recorders. it wouldn't look nearly as cool, but it would certainly work better for most of us or at least for those of us for whom stealth is a concern. again, i know i'm the one at fault here but i like to think that companies should spend more time thinking about how to minimize operator error than they currently do.
end of freaked-out rant and thanks for listening. now i must get me back to another drink ...
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Get something else for your reporter duty - who needs 24/96 for a couple of quotes...?
Plenty of little digital voice recorders out there...might be better for this purpose...
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Thanks for your rant. Many of the reasons why you hate the R-09, are features that make it great for concert stealth recording.
For instance you rant "the hold button is so flat to the surface that it's both hard to move and hard to know if it's been moved", that gives me peace of mind that I am not accidently disengaging the hold button when the R-09's sitting in my pocket and I get body-slammed by some 16 year old punk in the mosh pit at a Korn show.
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Bummer about your loss... We've all lost audio at one time or another and I find it hurts most when it isn't a technical failure but operator error on the device.
Sometimes it is the gear.. But other times it just isn't the gear. Like when I had a power cord problem recently. I wanted to blame the cord and it felt good to rant about it.. But the fact is, I was the one who introduced a new preamp to my rig but did not do an adequate wiggle test on the power cord. That it LOOKED really solid meant nothing once my source was very damaged
In terms of post-mortem.. You didn't check that you were recording and had levels when starting, didn't use in-ear monitoring, didn't use the hold switch. Perhaps biggest of all, you didn't practice with the recorder. The recorder is not to blame..
You can go back to casette or develop workflow practices that are more compatible with the current technology and the importance of what you are recording.
I'm a little surprised that you tried to record something so important without a way to continuously monitor and without a backup secondary device.
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i'm a little surprised, too, freelunch. otoh, i had used the recorder, with backup, a number of times in equally important situations -- and did so with no problems. i guess i got a little cocky. and we all know what happens when that happens!
my rant aside, i do know that my operator mistakes were sufficiently searing that i don't think they'll happen again. i learned a number of lessons -- the kind that only pain can teach.
at this pt, i't'd be pretty difficult to go back to a plain-jane recorder or a less sophisticated digital device. i like the mikes on this thing too much -- as well as the fact that i can record for a long long time without having to change recording mediums. in the future, i'm going to use the hold button without fail, forget about the pause button entirely, check the audio levels every now and then, and get some kind of back-up device to just let run in my backback.
thanks, all, for letting me rant. i do know that i have no one to blame but myself. but it does sometimes feel good to spread it around a little, just to take the pressure off.
pax.
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Did you try to amplify the file in Cool Edit "just in case"?
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you need the Nagra ARES M ;)
i'm a little surprised, too, freelunch. otoh, i had used the recorder, with backup, a number of times in equally important situations -- and did so with no problems. i guess i got a little cocky. and we all know what happens when that happens!
my rant aside, i do know that my operator mistakes were sufficiently searing that i don't think they'll happen again. i learned a number of lessons -- the kind that only pain can teach.
at this pt, i't'd be pretty difficult to go back to a plain-jane recorder or a less sophisticated digital device. i like the mikes on this thing too much -- as well as the fact that i can record for a long long time without having to change recording mediums. in the future, i'm going to use the hold button without fail, forget about the pause button entirely, check the audio levels every now and then, and get some kind of back-up device to just let run in my backback.
thanks, all, for letting me rant. i do know that i have no one to blame but myself. but it does sometimes feel good to spread it around a little, just to take the pressure off.
pax.
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yup, tried to amplify w/ cool edit -- instead of silence i get buckets of hiss.
btw / the thing that worries me most about the whole experience is that, for the life of me, i can't actually figure out for sure how the levels got turned down to zero. it happened in the middle of a recording. i can watch on cool edit the levels go *instantly* to zero, with no ramp down, as if i'd turned the machine off, which obviously i did not do, since the recording continued.
i'm going to do an experiment. i'm going to put the machine on record about where the levels were and see what happens when i reduce them to zero. i would expect a gradual fade. but that's not what i got in the field.
hmmmm. curiouser and curiouser, maybe.
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you need the Nagra ARES M ;)
If it was capable of more than one GB and 1648 resoluton, I think we would have a winner....
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you need the Nagra ARES M ;)
If it was capable of more than one GB and 1648 resoluton, I think we would have a winner....
well, for recording interviews, it would be a dream. who wants to hear 24 bits of hot air? :D
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well, doesn't that beat all. just as i expected and knew would happen, if you record while pressing the input level button, you do indeed get a gradual fade.
so how come my recording went from something to nothing in a flash? any thoughts? i've listened to it again and call tell that i'm not fiddling with the device -- i.e. there's no rustling on the recording, no indication that the levels are being messed with.
uh oh.
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Did your battery die?
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nope; plus, if the battery had died, all functions would have stopped. the recording continues for about another hour. then, the next day, i started recording again, for several hours -- with the same flat-line response. when i did notice the levels were at zero, i had no trouble raising them. but how did they get turned down? arf!
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Maybe switched the mic gain from high to low on the back?
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nope, the gain switch is where it's always been.
baring some weird internal malfunction, all i can think of at this pt is that i somehow put the recorder on pause, somehow reduced the input levels to zero, then went back into record-on mode. but again i don't hear the rustling i have always heard when i'm actually handling the recorder. btw/ i'm using the built-in mics so it's not like something got unplugged. i'm baffled.
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I'd have to agree with you.... if the levels as reported by the display went from something to zero in an instant, this sounds like a software issue. I can think of several things that could cause a sudden loss of sound but nothing that could cause the level indication to go to zero other than pressing and holding the level button. And like you said, that would stairstep down. I'd call Roland and see if you can talk to someone. Not good. And even more interesting that yours seems to be the first reported case?
Paul
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floete, I'm a journalist myself so I can feel your pain. I'm constantly looking for the perfect device, and so far the R-09 is the best I've used. I also wish it would have a slightly better design, a tiny loudspeaker and, above all, some simple editing functions. Just being able to crop a file would be a dream for us quote-hungry journalists. I can't go with the Nagra because I love being able to record to SD cards. And I agree with you: how can we go back to tape or MD when we have been spoiled with the beautiful R-09?
Good luck next time.
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Not sure if this is any kind of clue or not, but I discovered (thankfully when running the unit as a TEST) that if there is anything at all plugged into the mic in socket, it will set itself to external mic and if there ISN"T actaully a mic running you record.... white noise. i had intended to leave an L adapter in there for when I use external mics but clearly that won't work.
Is it possible the menu somehow got switched to "external mic" during recording? Seems unlikely, but.....
Just musings.
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well, a call to edirol proved fruitless: "I have no explanation for that, honestly," the tech fellow said. "I really don't know what's going on."
for further edification, here are two cool edit screen shots, one of the whole recording, the next a close up of the cut off point. maybe somebody will see something in these that i don't. i do note, however, that in the big picture, the levels midway through seem to go to the max, then drop to about halfway for about 15 minutes, then cut out altogether. hmmm. thoughts, anyone?
(http://www.linter.org/edirol1.jpg)
(http://www.linter.org/edirol2.jpg)
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Very weird. Doesn't this suggest some kind of actual malfunction, especially since it's now down it more than once?
As a new R09 owner, I'm definitely following this..... Be interested to see what further response Edirol has (did you send them the screenshots?)
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At the cutoff point, I see the level drop to a very low level. But then it comes back up...... but is recording noise instead of mic audio? That looks more like an internal problem in the audio path and is not what I would expect to see if the level control was actually at zero.
Was the AGC on? If so, something could have failed and caused it to reduce the level.
What that looks the most like is what you would see if something shut off the mic power. Or disconnected the mics altogether.
Are you SURE the level display said zero after this happened?
Paul
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hi paul: the cut-off point is at around the 1:09 mark. is that what you're looking at? when i look at it all i see is flat line until the end of this particular recording.
nope, agc was never on.
i'm not *exactly* sure that the level read zero but certainly if it'd read 1 i would have gotten something recorded, instead of nothing.
btw / wouldn't it make a kind of sense to have the lowest possible level input setting be 1 instead of zero? baring that, what i'd really like to see is an internal menu option that'd allow me to specify a lowest level input setting, which would hopefully keep this kind of thing from happening. otoh, if it is a malfunction, all bets are off.
i'm going to email the pix to roland and see what they say, if anything.
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I agree that the 0 mute option should not be on the scale.. We've discussed this in the threads before. It IS a problem waiting to happen if you're changing levels without looking. It would be nice if there was an option to change it.. Though I'm not sure we'll ever get one. Edirol seems to do their products pretty well the first time, declare them DONE and move on (only releasing essential bug fixes).
FYI, I measured mute on the r09 as about -58dB. It is not a total mute. So if you were getting input, there's a chance something may be buried in the noise.
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you're right, freelunch -- if i take the dead zone and use cool edit to add full strength amplication, i do get a reading at -59dB. sadly, it's complete and total noise. thanks for the thought, though!
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Sorry, I didn't see the flat line after the end of audio. I was looking at the dip at the 0:55:00 mark.
If you expand that point, does it indeed go to zero in an instant? You might be able to glean something by looking very closely sample by sample at the point where it drops. However, -50dB or so of white noise sounds to me like a LOT more than you would have if the level went to zero. Sounds more like an internal failure before the mic pre.
Paul
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hi paul et al:
here are two close ups of the instant where it drops down to what i'm calling zero:
(http://www.linter.org/edirol3.jpg)
(http://www.linter.org/edirol4.jpg)
to me they look as flat line as you can get. that said, maybe there's noise there that's only apparant at full amplication. in any event, here is what roland technical support has to say:
"If your AGC is set to OFF, your source signal is unchanging and the level is dropping without manually adjusting the input gain then it sounds like your R-09 needs service. Please call our customer service department at 323-890 3700 ext 2289 to make arrangements."
next step -- another call to roland. will keep ya'll posted!
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I recall that the r09 makes a small noise when the gain is adjusted. Perhaps you can familiarize yourself with that sound, verify that you can hear it elsewhere and then listen for it in the suspect zone?
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"If your AGC is set to OFF, your source signal is unchanging and the level is dropping without manually adjusting the input gain then it sounds like your R-09 needs service. Please call our customer service department at 323-890 3700 ext 2289 to make arrangements."
while they have it, ask them to strengthen the solder connection for the line input jack to prevent imminent failure.
you want a real world rant? saturday night, i broke my THIRD r09 input jack. after having line input #2 break, i've been babying this one at unprecedented levels. guess what? can't change the fact that it's a poorly designed POS if it's that prone to in-field failure when used with external mics.
roland customer support leaves a lot to be desired as well. good luck!
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I am surprised a reporter would use one. I keep reading how fragile these units are
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Something happened yesterday which made me think of this thread.
Were you by any chance keeping it in a Treo phone case? I used mine yesterday and as I was setting the levels (with the case on, iow pushign the buttons through the elastic sides) I set them and stopped.... and it kept going. Clearly the elastic was tight enough to keep the button "contact" in the pushed position so it kept changing it. I took it out of the case and it immediately stopped. No problem with it when I recorded the performance (another great tape using the INTERNAL mics - I'm just gobsmacked by the quality it gives me!)
It's a longshot, but I thought it worth posting what had happened as a heads up for anybody else using that case. I plan to cut holes for those buttons to avoid any further problem.
FWIW.