The Best Field Gear at AES
TOP PICKS FROM GOTHAM SOUND'S PETER SCHNEIDER
Peter Schneider, co-owner of the Manhattan-based sound rental house/reseller Gotham Sound, cruised the aisles of AES in New York 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 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’s TRX900 wireless microphone transceiver and HHB’s 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.WAV 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," he says. "It doesn’t generate time code, but it locks onto external time code, which is really the way to do it anyway. The only thing remotely limiting is that it only has two tracks."
Seeing as location audio has virtually always been two tracks (at most) with perfectly acceptable results, the HD-P2, at its price, is sure to be a blessing for many location sound mixers- and their production budgets.
The second big eye-catcher of AES for Schneider was Zaxcom’s TRX900 wireless microphone transceiver ($1,960). 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 time code, up to six hours of audio, giving protection against dropouts.
Another location audio product Schneider likes, more geared for ENG work, is the HHB FlashMic ($1,399). This combines a Sennheiser omni-directional condenser capsule with a built-in Flash Recorder capable of over 18 hours of recording. It’s powered by two AA batteries, in either linear.WAV files or MPEG 2 formats, and sits in the palm of your hand.
Categories: Audio, News, Technology