This is cool on several levels. I'll just cut-n-paste from the Harmony Central newsletter:
Evolving Technology. Here at HC, my colleagues and I review a lot of gear, and it’s encouraging to see regular, unrelenting progress made in technology, design, and overall sound quality across the board. I don’t think it’s selective memory to say that gear is just a whole lot better now than it was in decades past. We almost never see something that’s a “total dog.”
A total dog presents the reviewer with a conundrum: You question why you’re wasting keystrokes and other people’s eyeballs on something no one should buy. Or something that was released with some profoundly deal-killing flaw that will be fixed in an upgrade. But that just doesn’t happen anymore. Only very rarely must a piece of gear be reviewed that is both a Dubious Thing and a Thing Which Cannot Be Ignored. There are examples of Things Which Cannot Be Ignored in other arenas—such as the release of a new Woody Allen film or a Van Halen album—but gear doesn’t fall into that category. It's always good, it seems. Even when a new release is controversial (for example, grousing about what long-awaited Pro Tools wishlist item wasn't included), updates never go backward in terms of improvements or features.
My favorite example of a new technology where nothing seems to be going wrong, and where every released model drives the field forward, is high-quality handheld recorders. These things are truly portable, because they are battery powered, can be operated with one hand and deliver 24-bit/96kHz sound. And they’ve exploded in the past few years in a way no other paradigm, software- or hardware-based, has.
To truly appreciate this development, it helps to have lived through the era when cassettes transitioned to MiniDiscs. These were the bad old days where you just could not get decent sound in a small-scale environment. Cassettes were portable but horrible. DATs were never portable (and plagued with copy-protection issues), so it was Sony’s MiniDisc technology that provided stereo and mulitrack technology in small-scale digital format, finally rescuing people from noisy cassettes.
But it was a clumsy medium. A MiniDisc was, after all, just a small optical disc, and people sensed that it was a clever and kludgy take on backward-looking technology. Though Tascam, Sony, and Yamaha each had several multi-track models in their line, you sensed it was a short-lived, transitional phase. Enough people resisted so that, sure enough and soon enough, it went away.
By contrast, consider how many companies already have offerings in high-quality handhelds: Alesis, Edirol, Korg, Marantz, M-Audio, Olympus, Roland, Sony, Tascam, Yamaha, and Zoom. Each has released portable audio recorders (some with multiple entries) that make all kinds of small-scale production possible. You have to dig really deep—and that’s part of the fun, of course—to find one that wouldn’t suit your needs or doesn’t have the features you want. Most buyers just pick one and it serves them well. They’ll never even miss the perceived benefits in a competing unit unless they A/B’d them in a systematic way or evaluated them under laboratory conditions.
While a tip of the hat must go to all these companies, amidst their collective efforts in advancing the portable recorder industry as a whole, one company’s innovation really stands out: Roland’s CS-10EM http://www.roland.com/products/en/CS-10EM/. This is a set of earbuds with small, powered stereo microphones on the outsides of the earpieces. The cord has two ends: one to plug into the recorder’s headphone/ear jack, the other into the mic jack. Through an internal setting on the recorder, you can power these little condenser mics, which take up no more room than the buds themselves. You don’t even notice the microphone part (see photo above), but having mics sticking out of your ears approximates the audio practice known as binaural recording, where the recorder hears exactly what your ears do, and with wider separation than a single mic housing or even onboard mics can provide. What's more, you don't miss any any of the action. I recorded a performance of Handel's Messiah at Carnegie Hall in New York City this way when I was testing them. Sure, I got some harsh stares (people probably thought I was listening to a ball game), but it worked amazingly well, and it didn't detract from the sonic quality of the performance one bit.
There are more benefits to this system, too. If you need to record a telephone conversation, you can just insert the buds in your ears and hold the phone as you normally would. Incredibly, you hear the sound not from the phone’s speaker, but coming from the phone into the mic, down into the recorder, and back out the input monitor circuitry into your earbuds. It’s more controllable that way and great for noisy environments. I’ve actually used these buds for close-miking (a person talking, an elevator speaker) by holding one bud up to the source while keeping the other in my ear. Looks weird, but works well. I’m hoping “powered bud-mics” will become a standard feature on other recorders, and not just for Roland’s. It’s an example of one company staying competitive with the state of the industry while going the extra mile to throw in a little innovation and uniqueness.
—Jon Chappell
Evolving Technology. Here at HC, my colleagues and I review a lot of gear, and it’s encouraging to see regular, unrelenting progress made in technology, design, and overall sound quality across the board. I don’t think it’s selective memory to say that gear is just a whole lot better now than it was in decades past. We almost never see something that’s a “total dog.”
A total dog presents the reviewer with a conundrum: You question why you’re wasting keystrokes and other people’s eyeballs on something no one should buy. Or something that was released with some profoundly deal-killing flaw that will be fixed in an upgrade. But that just doesn’t happen anymore. Only very rarely must a piece of gear be reviewed that is both a Dubious Thing and a Thing Which Cannot Be Ignored. There are examples of Things Which Cannot Be Ignored in other arenas—such as the release of a new Woody Allen film or a Van Halen album—but gear doesn’t fall into that category. It's always good, it seems. Even when a new release is controversial (for example, grousing about what long-awaited Pro Tools wishlist item wasn't included), updates never go backward in terms of improvements or features.
My favorite example of a new technology where nothing seems to be going wrong, and where every released model drives the field forward, is high-quality handheld recorders. These things are truly portable, because they are battery powered, can be operated with one hand and deliver 24-bit/96kHz sound. And they’ve exploded in the past few years in a way no other paradigm, software- or hardware-based, has.
To truly appreciate this development, it helps to have lived through the era when cassettes transitioned to MiniDiscs. These were the bad old days where you just could not get decent sound in a small-scale environment. Cassettes were portable but horrible. DATs were never portable (and plagued with copy-protection issues), so it was Sony’s MiniDisc technology that provided stereo and mulitrack technology in small-scale digital format, finally rescuing people from noisy cassettes.
But it was a clumsy medium. A MiniDisc was, after all, just a small optical disc, and people sensed that it was a clever and kludgy take on backward-looking technology. Though Tascam, Sony, and Yamaha each had several multi-track models in their line, you sensed it was a short-lived, transitional phase. Enough people resisted so that, sure enough and soon enough, it went away.
By contrast, consider how many companies already have offerings in high-quality handhelds: Alesis, Edirol, Korg, Marantz, M-Audio, Olympus, Roland, Sony, Tascam, Yamaha, and Zoom. Each has released portable audio recorders (some with multiple entries) that make all kinds of small-scale production possible. You have to dig really deep—and that’s part of the fun, of course—to find one that wouldn’t suit your needs or doesn’t have the features you want. Most buyers just pick one and it serves them well. They’ll never even miss the perceived benefits in a competing unit unless they A/B’d them in a systematic way or evaluated them under laboratory conditions.
While a tip of the hat must go to all these companies, amidst their collective efforts in advancing the portable recorder industry as a whole, one company’s innovation really stands out: Roland’s CS-10EM http://www.roland.com/products/en/CS-10EM/. This is a set of earbuds with small, powered stereo microphones on the outsides of the earpieces. The cord has two ends: one to plug into the recorder’s headphone/ear jack, the other into the mic jack. Through an internal setting on the recorder, you can power these little condenser mics, which take up no more room than the buds themselves. You don’t even notice the microphone part (see photo above), but having mics sticking out of your ears approximates the audio practice known as binaural recording, where the recorder hears exactly what your ears do, and with wider separation than a single mic housing or even onboard mics can provide. What's more, you don't miss any any of the action. I recorded a performance of Handel's Messiah at Carnegie Hall in New York City this way when I was testing them. Sure, I got some harsh stares (people probably thought I was listening to a ball game), but it worked amazingly well, and it didn't detract from the sonic quality of the performance one bit.
There are more benefits to this system, too. If you need to record a telephone conversation, you can just insert the buds in your ears and hold the phone as you normally would. Incredibly, you hear the sound not from the phone’s speaker, but coming from the phone into the mic, down into the recorder, and back out the input monitor circuitry into your earbuds. It’s more controllable that way and great for noisy environments. I’ve actually used these buds for close-miking (a person talking, an elevator speaker) by holding one bud up to the source while keeping the other in my ear. Looks weird, but works well. I’m hoping “powered bud-mics” will become a standard feature on other recorders, and not just for Roland’s. It’s an example of one company staying competitive with the state of the industry while going the extra mile to throw in a little innovation and uniqueness.
—Jon Chappell
