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Marantz PMD560 Solid State Audio Recorder
Believe it or not, there is a group of young audio professionals out there in the world who have never recorded to tape. I am not one of them. I still remember slicing up my fingers editing quarter-inch tape back in my broadcast days. We old-school types have been skeptical of new stuff, and when they told us we could record to a hard disk, we scoffed and jeered every time we heard stories of early digital audio workstations “losing” entire sessions (and we cried when those lost sessions were our own). There was something comfortable and familiar about seeing a strip of tape unwind from one reel to another passing over a tape head, capturing our carefully crafted signals, even in the digital domain, which was not a model of reliability in the early days. I had always recognized that recording with no moving parts was technically plausible, but it seemed—well—kinda weird. I eventually gave into the attraction, and I have used portable flash recorders for a couple of years now, and I don’t know how I survived without them. Marantz offers the PMD560 professional solid-state recorder, a rack-mounted professional recorder that is intended for numerous purposes, not the least of which is in houses of worship.
Recording to RAM is an elegant and simple way to avoid the attendant difficulties of mechanical systems with moving parts. The PMD560 records to Compact Flash (CF) memory, which is ubiquitously available—even at your corner Wal-Mart. The recorder can also accommodate (in the same slot) a Microdrive, which is a tiny hard drive that fits in the space of a CF card. Since it is a true hard disk drive, however, the ostensible benefit of eliminating moving parts is lost. A 1GB card can hold over an hour of uncompressed stereo audio and over 36 hours of compressed mono audio. The largest CF cards of which I am aware feature a whopping 16GB of space. Microdrives up to 8GB in capacity are currently available, and both the drive and flash RAM will continue to increase in size and decrease in price. In my estimation, the most desirable scheme is to simply install a very large (4, 8, or 16GB) CF card in the unit, and then simply back up your recordings as you go. The point here is that the CF can be semi-permanently installed. On the other hand, small, inexpensive CF cards provide their own backup, and can be physically “filed” for safekeeping. Having that option is very convenient.
In the PMD560, compressed means that that audio is encoded in the MP3 format. Uncompressed means 16-bit linear PCM digital audio at either 44.1-kHz or 48-kHz sample rates. The recorder offers encoding at 64 or 128 kbps, the former yielding sufficient quality for voice-only recordings, and the latter being the accepted standard for Internet music downloads. This standard rate is easily distinguished from compact disk audio in A/B comparisons, but frankly does not sound bad. Interestingly, the PMD560 will only record at the lower resolution in mono and only at the higher resolution in stereo. This really is not a problem at all, however, because the 64 kbps rate yields audio quality somewhere north of AM radio and not quite FM quality for voice, and the 128 kbps rate is substantially better, if music is a necessary component of recording or playback. Chances are that if music is involved, you’ll want to record and or play back in stereo. And on that note—while recording is the primary function of the unit, and very nice to have, it’s also convenient to have playback as well, for what ought to be pretty obvious reasons.
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