Technogy for Recording Digital Audio

Instructors and students have been asking for the equipment to let them record and edit audio digitally for years at Malaspina. Students need to conduct interviews, create radio ads and create audio clips for class assignments. Faculty have long wanted simple ways to record, edit and upload their lectures in digital audio format for their students. Currently we have a very simplistic system in our digital video editing suites for working on editing digital audio. In the new library we will have specialised hardware and software for creating digital audio files that is more robust but we don't have a way of recording the files digitally, especially remotely. We have digital video cameras for recording video but we only have analogue audio cassettes for field recording audio. The quality is poor and the conversion to digital for editing is near impossible with our system. To streamline the process of audio production I am hoping to buy a couple of portable digital audio recorders. My requirements are affordability, ruggedness, size, ease of use, versatility, Macintosh compatibility, quality and maturity of the technology.

Hard Drive solutions provide the most storage space but are generally physically larger than other digital audio recorders and because of the power needed for the drive they tend to have worse battery performance. At the highest quality uncompressed mono recording you will be able to fit 1800 minutes (30 hours) onto one 10 GB non-removable hard drive. In standard 128 kbps mono MP3 format you will be able to fit over 10000 minutes (170 hours) onto one 10 GB non-removable hard drive:
Sound Devices 722 (40 GB) $2800
Edirol R-4 (40 GB) $1700
Fostex FR2 (4 GB) $1500
Sony PCM-D1 (4GB) $2000

Solid State audio recorders are small (average 750 grams), have great battery lives (average 7 hours of record time) and are easy to connect to a computer (USB and removable media.) The media (cf cards) are small and extremely rugged but cost are becoming more affordable (currently 1 GB costs $50.) At the highest quality uncompressed mono recording you will be able to fit 180 minutes (2 hours) on one 1 GB CF card. In standard 128 kbps mono MP3 format you will be able to fit over 1000 minutes (17 hours) onto on 1 GB CF card:
Marantz PMD670 $800
Marantz PDM660 $500
Denon F20R$1500
M-Audio MicroTrack $400

CD Recorders have the cheapest blank media but are also the largest digital audio recorders and have shorter battery life than other formats. Most of them only record in PCM uncompressed audio but are easily played in your computer or CD plyer and therefore are very versatile. Unfortunately because they only record uncompressed audio in stereo your maximum record time is 80 minutes per $1 (700 MB) disk:
Marantz CDR300 $800

Minidisk is a proven technology with a small form factor, good battery life and cheap and rugged media but their reliance on Sony's proprietary ATRAC audio CODEC and their Windows only connection software makes them less versitiale than other options. A standard $4 minidisk holds 80 minutes in stereo and 160 minutes in mono, the $5 Hi-MD (1GB) minidisk holds 475 minutes in ATRAC3plus and 94 minutes uncrompressed PCM:
HHB MDP500 $1500
Marantz PMD650 $1000
Sony MZ-RH1 $400 (Hi-MD now with USB 2.0 and Mac OS support)

DAT: is a favourite of the audio professional but it's linear nature and the fact that it still uses magnetic tape lessens it's appeal. Most models are discontinued with short battery lives (average 2 hours) and the tapes are difficult to find. The average $10 DAT tape records 120 minutes of uncompressed stereo digital audio:
Tascam DA-P1 $2800

If our department had unlimited resources I would recommend buying the Sound Devices 722 40 GB Hard Drive audio recorder. Although the device is very large it provides amazing quality, quick uploads, rugged construction and an unparalleled amount of recording space (over 120 hours at the highest quality!) But the cost is just too high. The much smaller and affordable Marantz PMD670 ($800) seems to best suit our needs. It is well constructed, provides flexible recording settings, small rugged media, fast convenient connection to computers and high quality sound. Hopefully the cost of CF cards will continue to drop making larger disks with longer record times available to students and employees. I will continue to research and would be happy to hear your thoughts and suggestions.