I may be in the market for a new recorder. One requirement is AES in. I know the following have it, are there any others I am either forgetting or didn't know they had AES in?
Fostex FR2
Roland R4pro
SD boxes
I am hoping to avoid having to convert AES to S/PDIF.
There's various AES standards. Even for just digital mics, which is what I assume you mean. You can convert, more or less, AES3 to/from S/PDIF since the bit streams are the same IIRC. You'll probably want a converter box to match electrical characteristics.
The newer and, to me at least, more interesting mic spec. is AES42. And this comes in a couple of flavors. AES42 mode 1 seems to be little more than a wrapper around AES3, with some physical characteristics (digital phantom power is +10VDC for example). AES42 mode 2 is the one that allows control of the mic from the mixer/recorder/other-end-of-the-cable. If you want to control, say, a Neumann KM 185 D, then you'll want a device that supports that control. One such device is the Neumann DMI-2 portable.
If you want that functionality built into a field mixer (as I do), well, there's very little to choose from. Basically, it's just the new Anton Cantar X3 which isn't on the market quite yet.
Why is mode 2 important to a Taper? It's the mode that lets the mixer be the word clock master. And this makes stereo recording that much cleaner. With a mode 1 system, each mic is its own word clock master, and the mixer has to re-sample each mic input to sync them on word clock boundaries. Which pretty much defeats the point of putting the A>D on the mic body, and adds cost to the mixer. AES42 mode 2 avoids this -- all mics are always in sync with the mixer they are plugged into so no re-sampling takes place.
While there are a few digital mics out there (40 or so last I heard), most of them are AES42 mode 1 mics and thus aren't very interesting to me. A few are AES42 mode 2 mics, mainly from Neumann and with an interesting module from Sennheiser, the MZD 8000. Then, there aren't any AES42 mode 2 mixer/recorders out there yet -- you have to buy a Neumann DMI-2 to talk to a pair of mics. All of which just makes going the AES42 mode 2 route prohibitive. Too much cost, too many add-on boxes, more cables. Too much pain for too little gain in my book.
When it comes to AES 42 mode 1 and AES3, I think this thread has already listed all the mixers/recorders I know about.
AES 42 mode 2 is a great idea. It would solve a lot of problems, not least is making our location mixer/recorders smaller, cheaper, and lighter. I'd love to support it. But the manufacturers of analog mic-pres and the devices that use them aren't in any hurry to cede any control (or profits) to the microphone manufacturers. So if you want this, you're going to have to make your voice heard. Which means talking to your favorite vendors, etc. Just sayin'.