a lot of people have asked me what we use to record audio at events we produce.

that’s marty, hard at work recording the audio of 9 concurrent session at ISC West, a 10,000 person security industry conference in Las Vegas. fortunately, all the audio from all the rooms was fed into one control room so we could have one person monitor all the audio devices from one location. running around from room to room checking levels and signals, while a good workout, isn’t quite as fun.

we have a few different types of recorders on hand…some of the latest and greatest 8 track and casette tape recorders on the market. just joking. but i’ve seriously been to events where the AV guy in the back of the room is flipping 60 minute casette tapes. all of our audio recorders are digital audio recorders.

our goal, as soon as a session is over, is to pull the audio from the recorder, and ftp the audio files to our offices in new york so our post-production team can start to work on the audio files and upload them into our multimedia players, such as the audio conference player. this doesn’t happen if you’re recording to tape…

the three digital audio recorders that we use the most frequently are the Fostex FR-2 Field Memory Recorder, the Marantz PMD-660, and the M-Audio Microtrack 24/96.

the Fostex is kind of like the Cadillac of audio recorders. it’s also the most expensive, weighing in at $1,200. it’s a big ol’ gas guzzler, but when you’re in the drivers seat, fully reclined, it’s a smooth ride. basically, it’s a bitch to travel with because it’s big, but once you are on location, it’s dreamy.

the Fostex has plenty of inputs and outputs, you can cut files while it is recording live with a flick of a switch, and it has a built in monitor so you don’t need head phones. it has plenty of knobs to turn, a nice big digital display, and more.

like the other digital audio recording devices I’m about to describe, the Fostex takes compact flash memory cards. these cards are getting cheaper all the time. we typically use 2 GB and 4 GB cards.

one downside is that the Fostex FR-2 only records .wav, which means big monstrous files. so you definitely need at least a 2GB card. other recorders can record to MP3, which compresses the files so the same hour long audio file is much smaller than if it were saved as a .wav file.

i can’t remember if you can connect the Fostex to your computer directly to pull audio files to your desktop, and i’m too lazy to pull it out of the back closet, but my guess is yes.

typically, I just pop the flash cards out, put them into a card reader attached to my computer via USB and pull everything onto my desktop. the Fostex has rechargable batteries that are kind of heavy.

the Marantz is like Momma Bear. she’s not as big and burly as Poppa Bear, which is a plus for travel, but she also doesn’t have all the inputs, outputs, knobs, etc.

the Marantz takes 4 AA batteries, in addition to AC power. one downside is that if you want to pull audio from the Marantz to your computer, you need to plug the power cable into the wall.

this means that if you’re in the middle of the desert with a Marantz on batteries and a lap top on batteries, you will not be able to pull audio from the Marantz to the computer via USB cable until you plug the Marantz into it’s AC adaptor. this seems like an arbitrary decision by the Marantz people. “why,” i say? “why?”

you can create up to three pre-sets on the Marantz. For example, we typically have preset 1 = line in, 44.1K, which is CD quality, stereo, mp3 output; preset 2 = microphine in, 44.1K, stereo, mp3 output; preset 3 = all the same as preset 2, but with mono instead of stereo.

the Marantz has two XLR inputs for stereo microphone (left and right). If you want to do mono, you just plug into the left XLR input.

the stupid thing is that it’s line input is a single mini jack. Typically, if you are getting a line out from a mixing board, it is XLR or quarter inch. So to have a mini input to the Marantz seems not very well thought out. I don’t have many XLR to mini cables or quarter inch to mini cables.

What you also can’t do is have your left channel come from a line input and your right channel come from a mic input. Sometimes I’d love to have the house audio come in from the mixing board as a line out and also plug a microphone into the Marantz so I can get ambient crowd noise. As far as I can tell, this is not possible. It’s either all mic or all line.

The M-Audio Microtrack 24/96 is like mini-me. It fits in your pocket, can go anywhere, and is made by a company that has been in the digital world for a long time. The Marantz and Fostex were created by companies with their roots in analog field recording.

It has two quarter inch inputs, left and right. It’s a wee little device that does everything that’s asked of it. It has no internal monitor so you have to plug headphones in to test levels. It does have a visual display of the levels on it’s small, yet adequate screen.

the m-audio microtrack has rechargable internal batteries and comes with a clever power supply that is really a USB cable that plugs into a two prong piece so it can plug into a wall outlet. the only problem is when you plug the USB into the two prongs, the connection can easily become undone. this happened to me once where we accidentally knocked it, the plug came out of the two prong piece, and the m-audio slowly went through it’s battery and powered off. fortunately, we had back-up, but that was a scare.

if anyone’s interested in learning how we capture video for quick post-production work, let me know. i’d be happy to drone on about that as well…