As some of you may have noticed, I'm a 99% stealth kind of guy.
The vast majority of the shows I goto are stealthed by necessity. Every once in a while, I get to clip my mics to a stand and get above the crowd, but it's a rare opportunity.
It's finally time to retire the MD unit and I'm trying to decide where to go from here. I found a guy who's willing to buy my old MD/Sound Pros rig for a decent price, so that'll help setup my budget.
I definitely do NOT want a HDD-based unit. The battery life is generally terrible, the spinning disk generates a ton of heat and could easily be detected by a wand search, and it generally doesn't seem like a good fit for a stealth rig.
That leaves me, then, with a pocket-sized flash recorder. I've narrowed it down to two, I think: The MT 24/96 and the R-09. My question to you, dear reader, is this: Which do I pick?
I tend to be the kind of guy that tapes shows because it doesn't take a lot of work and planning to grab the rig, hit the show, setup, and pull a decent tape. I don't get anything outstanding (yet), but I'm a poor college kid (married!) and this is a hobby that I can barely afford. I'm upgrading out of savings and birthday money.
I like the R-09 because it runs on AA batteries and I have a ton of 2400mAh NiMH cells from my pre-Digital Rebel days. I'm not crazy about having to buy new flash cards (I own nothing on SD), but that seems minor.
The MT, however, costs a bit less, uses the CF cards I already have (4x 4GB for the Rebel XT), and does 24/96 (vs 24/48 on the R-09). The downside is that it seems to have lower-quality analog inputs (I'll be using CA cards and CA preamp or SP batt box) than the R-09. The R-09 doesn't have digital inputs, but that's not going to be a problem in the forseeable future, unless I become a patch-only kind of guy.
So ... I think that I've narrowed it down to the R-09, which I'm ready to buy from BPMmusic.com at a great price. I'll have to buy a 2GB SD card or two, but that's less than $100 pretty easily. Both the R-09 and the MT are pretty easy to stealth, it seems, as neither is much larger than my iPod, but the R-09 seems to be a better fit for what I have today and what I forsee having in the relatively near future.
I might upgrade to some DPAs or something at some point, but I dunno. Even then, I'll use a DPA pre-amp, right? That'll still be analog to the recorder, right?
Is there another recorder that I'm obviously overlooking? Something that would be better suited, perhaps? Any input would be great.
Thanks.
Topic: Best flash-based recorder for stealth? (Read 2771 times)