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 ...
Topic: edirol r-09 in the real world: a rant! (Read 7431 times)