I made an excellent furry windscreen for my Zoom H2, with fake fur from Walmart, for under $5.00, which I will duplicate and size for the Sony when I get it. Make a small hat with the fur inside out, staple or sew it and turn back over for a cute and functional kitten!

Roger Barnes

I made an excellent furry windscreen for my Zoom H2, with fake fur from Walmart, for under $5.00, which I will duplicate and size for the Sony when I get it. Make a small hat with the fur inside out, staple or sew it and turn back over for a cute and functional kitten!

Roger Barnes

Chris-France-

The preamps are amazing. Quietest I’ve used so far on a portable recorder (I’ve had the Marantz PMD 660, the MicroTrack 24/96 and the Edirol R-09). The internal mics are sensitive as hell. Even with the metal body, prepare yourself for handling noise. It’s not terrible, but it requires some good mic technique. It is very sensitive to pops and air movement. Buy the windscreen. You’ll definitely want it.

You can divide tracks on the fly but you will hear the button press in the recording as a faint click. One sore point: The door holding the memory stick rattles. I don’t know what they were smoking when they designed it. You could remove it I suppose, but I made a shim out of a thick piece of vinyl. Do you have a security badge attached to a tether? One of those has vinyl (next to the snap) the perfect thickness to slip behind the memory stick door as a shim. You can easily slip it out too, if you need to get access to the stick.

One other caution…it is sensitive to electric fields. Near my computer I got some crackly static and hum which went away as I got more than 4 feet away.

Sound quality was great, levels are great, the lowpass filter lets you filter out 75 or 150 MHz. I tested it with an external Beyerdynamics M58 and it sounds really nice.

Accessibility: The unit takes about 10 seconds to boot up, compared to the Edirol’s 3 second start time. Not so great for grab and go, but the battery life should allow you to turn it on and get you through an event. The batteries are on a slide-out sled so battery changes aren’t as quick as they could be, but the recorder is protected from a bad battery leaking and ruining the unit. I wonder if they will sell rechargeable LiON battery or extra sleds. That would make a reporter’s life a little easier.

This recorder is at least $100 more than Edirol or Marantz PMD 620 but I’d say the build quality alone makes it worth the extra money. When you factor in the quiet pre’s and the ability to prerecord, it’s a no-brainer. If you’re a pro, this is your professional tool. If you’re a podcaster, it might be overkill unless, like me you are obsessed with sound quality. I’m a happy camper.