I can't let go of this lack of pan control issue in the otherwise excellent R44 - sorry to be boring! But really, providing for balance control in the monitor mixer menu page would seem to me significantly to extend the market for the device further. It would enable proper playback on location without needing to have a mixer connected to the channel outputs - which to my mind is one item too many to carry around, especially as it would probably be larger and heavier than the recorder, and not battery powered (unless disproportionately expensive).
As it stands, monitoring options are restricted to those set out at the back of the manual. You can (in summary) either listen to each channel one at a time, or in stereo pairs (one pair or both pairs) or all four in mono. You can't listen to channel 1 on the left, channel two on the right, and channel three in the middle (for instance), neither can you do anything more subtle like listening to channel 1 on the left, channel two on the right, and channel three half-way between the right and the centre.
Why would you want to? Well, say you were recording four singers standing in a row, each with a mic. How would you play that back (or monitor it) in stereo without the positioning of the singers being completely scrambled?
If the CPU in the device was basically capable of outputting other than left/right/centre as at present, it could work as follows:-
The present mixer menu page would remain as at present, and you'd cursor across the four faders as at present, from one to four, adjusting monitor levels with the jog wheel. Anyone not interested in pan controls would not see them and could ignore them. But if you cursored to the right from fader four, you'd find yourself in a pan page, very much like the fader page, but with the faders horizontal, controlling pan. Further presses on the right cursor would go from pan control one through four. Turning the jog wheel would set the pan position/value for the current pan control. Cursor left from the first pan control to get back to the present fader page. Conceptually it would be like a set of four level faders with four balance faders to their right, but lack of space would require the split across two display pages.
Everything else would stay the same. To hear the panned mix, you'd press the headphone volume control as at present until the "LR" appeared against all channels on the display (as at present). If you hadn't altered the channel pans, that would as at present give you a mono mix of all channels. If you had altered the pans, you'd hear a stereo mix reflecting the pan changes you had made.
So, to repeat, what I'm suggesting would make no difference that I can see for someone not wanting to get into pans. It would work for them just like now. But the extra pan page (if you chose to access it) would make a huge difference in usability for the device for those needing panned monitoring direct from the device.
I suspect such a thing could be added through a firmware upgrade. I've seen references to people here talking to Frank of Roland, and if anyone can suggest a contact route to him, I'd be very keen to put this proposal forward. Just sending an email to Roland would probably not get the idea to the right place.
Topic: Edirol R-44 - Solid State 4 channel recorder (Read 141575 times)