The Marantz PMD660 is one of the more popular handheld, professional digital audio recorders due to the fact that it has two XLR inputs, unlike many other recorders in the same price range. But after a few years on the market, the PMD660 was starting to look a bit stale, especially after companies like Sony, M-Audio, Zoom, Edirol, and Olympus kept pushing out smaller, cheaper recorders. Sure, you could get the cheaper, smaller Marantz PMD620 recorder, but that doesn’t have XLR inputs.
Enter the PMD661. This recorder is the next generation of the PMD660. The new recorder is about 30% thinner than its predecessor, and uses SDHC cards up to 32GB instead of Compact Flash. It still has two XLR jacks, as well as a stereo 1/8 inch line input, a quarter inch headphone jack, and unbalanced RCA line outputs.
The PMD661 sports an OLED display and a new button layout with a nice big circular menu in the middle of the device with playback controls.
The recorder will set you back £523 in the UK. No word on US pricing yet, but that’s not surprising since there’s very little information available on the official product page at the moment.
via Sound On Sound
thanks Graham!
You forgot to mention an important upgrade: it’s now 24/96 capable. That was really one of the biggest drawbacks of the 660 more recently. That said, looks like they kept those crappy meters, oh well.
Now, this is what I have been talking about. Maybe it will review well, and I can finally have my setup for world domina… I mean, “field recording.”
This might be just the thing for some of my live event recordings… we’ve been using m-audio microtracks but haven’t been happy with them of late. Any idea if it will be able to accept line level (+4DbU) on it’s XLR inputs, I can always add a couple of pads, but i’d rather not.
12/16/08: Just got an email from SweetWater.com notifying me that this in in stock for $599.
Got 2 free balanced microphone free. http://www.martelelectronics.com/Marantz-PMD661.html They also had them instock. Super Deal.