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May 2012

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First Look: iKey Audio RM3 Professional Digital Recorder

Handy, low-cost unit records on SD cards or USB drives. Considering the cost, do you get what you pay for?

by Dustin Whitt

As a front-of-house audio mixer and trainer, I am a huge proponent of recording and evaluating board mixes. It's one simple yet very valuable way that we can all get better at what we do.

When asked to evaluate the iKey-Audio RM3 Professional Digital Recorder it seemed like a good fit. I'm always encouraging people to review their live mixes and this device has the potential to make that more convenient. Of course, recording the pastor's sermon is the most common use for an audio recorder in a church. With the rm3, you can record to an sd card or a usb drive and then transfer files to your computer.

Another cool feature of the RM3 is that it allows you to record to standard CD-quality WAV files or directly to MP3 format at 128, 256 or 320 kb/s. This is handy to help save some time encoding if you know that you only need an MP3 of the recording. I do wish that it had some more modern codec options, but the MP3 is as universal as it gets.

I tried recording in all formats and they all seem to sound true to their nature. You should note that when monitoring the headphone output, you are not hearing the data compression during recording. You will of course hear it on playback, just don't be fooled into thinking that a 128 kB/s MP3 sounds the same as an uncompressed WAV file.

The RM3 gives you a variety of input and output options. On the input side you get RCA, 1/4" TS and an XLR microphone input. For a professional recorder it really should have a balanced input, balanced XLR would be even better. The one XLR is for mic level signals only. There is an input gain switch on the front of the unit that has three settings, -20, 0 and +10. This controls all of the different flavors of input. You also have a digital gain control using the jog wheel. It is digital only though, it will not stop clipping on the input.

You also do not hear the digital gain changes in the headphones while recording. The headphones appear to monitor directly off the input, after the gain switch but before any digital gain or encoding. It would be nice to hear the digital gain changes in the headphones while recording. On the output side, you have a headphone jack, RCA and balanced XLR outputs. I found it puzzling that you get balanced XLR outputs but not inputs.

Operating the RM3 can be slightly less than intuitive at times. To record, you press the record button twice. On most recorders you press record then play. You also cannot pause during a recording, you must stop and start a new one.

I also had trouble connecting the RM3 to either of my Macs, although the instruction manual claims that it should simply show up as drive in the Finder on a Mac or under My Computer in Windows.

You also cannot make track markers or start a new track while recording. It's always nice to make markers or new tracks for each song, especially if it's a long set.

As mentioned earlier, headphone monitoring during record is straight off the input, before the digital gain. This is less than ideal. I want to hear exactly what is getting recorded.

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Dustin Whitt is a co-founder of OwnTheMix.com, an online audio training resource for churches. He is also a freelance audio engineer and has spent much of his career on staff at North Point Ministries. Todd and his wife Esther live in the northern suburbs of Atlanta with their son, Anderson.