Peter Schneider, co-owner of the Manhattan-based sound rental
house/reseller Gotham Sound, cruised the aisles of AES looking for hot,
new location audio products that could make his clients’ jobs easier.
While the products at this year’s AES weren’t quite as sexy as those
released at the past few shows, Schneider identified three products
sure to be stocked on the shelves at Gotham: TASCAM’s HD-P2 Portable HD
stereo audio Recorder, Zaxcom’sTRX900 wireless microphone transceiver
and HHB FlashMic.

TASCAM’s HD-P2 records two tracks from 44.1kHz up to 192kHz/16- to
24-bit resolution to Compact Flash media with time-stamped WAVE files
accessible instantly on any DAW, all for a suggested retail of $1,249.
“For around $1,000, to have a professional, two track recorder is very
impressive. It doesn’t generate timecode but it locks onto external
timecode, which is really the way to do it anyways. The only thing
remotely limiting is that it only has two tracks,” Schneider explains.

Seeing as location audio has virtually always been two tracks (at most)
with perfectly acceptable results, the HD-P2, at it’s price, is sure to
be a blessing for many location sound mixers and productions.

The second big eye-catcher of AES for Schneider was Zaxcom’s TRX900
wireless microphone tranceiver. Anyone who has ever recorded sound,
especially in a city, knows the frustration of having a perfectly wired
scene be destroyed by RF hits. But the TRX900, in addition to
transmitting the signal back to the receiver at the mixing cart,
records, with timecode, up to six hours of audio, giving protection
against drop-outs.

The third location audio product, more geared for ENG work, is the HHB
FlashMic, which combines a Sennheiser omni-directional condenser
capsule with a built-in Flash Recorder capable of over 18 hours of
recording, powered by two AA batteries, in either linear .WAV files or
MPEG 2 formats, all in the palm of your hand.