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Image courtesy of Denon/Marantz Professional
Let me just say it up front, I believe that the workflow represented by the 670 is the future of 1 and 2 track digital recording. I had envisioned a product with the features of the 670 for almost a year before I discovered it in late October 2003, even though the first model came out in 2000. I want to thank Paul Mathis with DM Professional who was gracious enough to arrange for a demo unit to be sent to me for my personal perusal.
Getting Started
Having worked in a print manufacturing facility for the last 11 years, I have spent a great deal of time pursuing the better, faster, easier way of getting the task accomplished. I've written custom applications, I've designed automated systems, I've removed every ounce of labor I could out of the desktop publishing system we use. In short, I have come to look at everything I do in terms of how to get it done as efficiently as possible without sacrificing quality. My approach was the same when I decided to record our church services digitally, ultimately to archive and distribute in MP3 format. How could I record them, edit them, encode and archive them as efficiently as possible? To many of you that may seem like a small task because you're likely thinking of a 30 minute sermon, and that's all. But, our services are a long ways from that. A typical service is a little over 2 hours, and as long as 3. During that 2 hours, timeless prophetic words may be given to individuals, key teachings may be delivered, original worship songs may be birthed, any number of things may occur that must be captured for posterity, because we see them as having eternal value. In short, there's great potential for a lot of content to have to wade through if I had to do it linearly. Can you imagine navigating a 2 hour recording for a 2 minute segment? I know there's always 15 minutes cassettes for such things, and we use them as well, but ultimately I want the same capabilities digitally. And yes, Mini-Disc offers markers, but you still have to re-capture from the Mini-Disc back to your DAW, in real time.It may see like I'm taking the long way around to ultimately talk about the PMD670, but only when you understand what the 670 replaces can you appreciate what it means.
My First Choice of Tools
I want to go down having said that I think Coaster by Christian Roth is the greatest piece of Freeware ever written for the Mac. Coaster is a tight, clean app that runs flawlessly on my legacy PowerMac 7500 & 8600 capture systems, and many others that I know of. I chose the 75/85/8600 family because of the built-in RCA audio I/O. I realize it's not as clean as the AudioMedia 3 that was so prominent in the early days of PCI Macs, but for speech, it's quite sufficient. I'm running OS8.6 because it does the job. I started out using the SyQuest SyJet removable drives/cartridges to shuttle my audio back and forth from church to home for editing, encoding and burning. That served me well for about 2 years until I upgraded my workstation at home to an 8600/200 with NewerTech G4/400, FireWire, USB, FWB JackHammer (Ultra SE), OS 9.1. Then I decided to add FireWire to the 7500 and go with a 20GB bus-powered FireWire drive from OWC. The FireWire setup is much smoother than the SyJet ever was.
It's The Workflow, Stupid
Coaster offers the ability to "break on the fly". The scissors button accomplishes a clean break in the file you're recording instantaneously, seamlessly and without any more interaction than the single click of the scissors button. And if you mess up you can paste the resulting files back together without loss (with fine products like Bias' Peak.) When you're done recording, you click Stop and click Save. And now you're presented with a dialog for naming your files. Up until now they're named a sequential series of names generated by Coaster. The reason this is so cool, is that it gives the user to ability to do a sort of "pre-edit", while recording. I see this as significant because during live events you are able to make judgments based on the circumstances - these are things that would normally take linear searching to find.
You are able to see things like the microphone getting handed to a different person, or that someone is going to pick up the mic. Those events can be accompanied by clicking the scissors button, which results in the current file being closed and a new file being opened and written to. This is HUGE for situations like mine, where the object isn't to incur more labor because I'll get paid more, because I'm not getting paid. I am essentially pre-editing my recordings so that all I have to do when I get home is double-check my edits, do a little copy/paste if my timing wasn't quite right, and I'm ready to MP3 encode, etc.. This means that I can typically find the proverbial needle in the haystack - I can find almost any unique event, in a few minutes. While this may seem counter-productive, to spend less time and therefore have less time to charge for, I think it means that audio engineers will have to change their thinking about how they charge for their time, because they're going to have more of it to work with! To me, the 670 has done for the audio workflow, what the digital camera is doing for the photography workflow.
Enough Background Already, What About The 670?!
Because of the factors I have taken the time to explain, the discovery of the PMD670 was monumental for me. Both because I had the same general idea - encapsulate the features of Coaster on the Mac in a tape deck-like form factor, that anybody can run, and, because I work with other churches where they may not have the personnel needed to man a computer for live recording purposes, yet they may have someone who could handle the back end of it. The 670 is a feature-packed piece of hardware. Your entire recording rig for things such as band concerts, rehearsals, auditions, etc. can consist of one case with the 670, mics and cables in it, and in the other hand your mic stand. No more schlepping a 6U rack, then coming back for another bag and a stand. Recording outdoor sound effects? No problem, just strap the 670 on with the included shoulder strap, take up your stereo mic of choice on a pistol grip, and you're set for over 90 minutes of digital recording.
Battery Life And The Price Of Rice
The 670 includes the necessary 12V "wall-wart" to power the 670, and charge the optional NiCad battery pack. That's a note of contention as well - wall warts make adjacent outlets unusable. "Soap-on-a-rope" supplies don't. As with all portable devices, your mileage will vary. Marantz states the typical recording battery life to be 7 hours with the optional NiMH pack (which requires its own proprietary charger), 6 hours on a set of Alkalines, and 5 hours on the optional NiCad pack. No doubt these are possible when not using phantom powered mics, no backlight, and very little headphone amp usage. My mileage was 2 hours on a fresh set of Energizers when powering a pair of Peavey PVM-480 condenser mics at my first gig. I did find that even though the battery life indicator showed that I was on fumes, I was able to fire it up and do some playback and such with it for probably another 1/2 hour after I got home. I suspect their "gas gauge" is a bit like most vehicles - they read more accurately with more starts and stops than on a long trip. One of the setup options is to tell the 670 what type of battery you are using, I assume that is to adjust the behavior of the "gas gauge."
User Interface - Menu Controls
With the advent of MP3 players and all the micro-sized gadgets we find ourselves relying on these days, one really starts to grow less tolerant of poor user interfaces. Some companies "get it", and some don't. The 670 is well thought out. Less than 5 minutes in the user manual will get you up and functioning. There are two main menu-driven setups you will spend most of your time in. One is the menu to choose "FORMAT" from, the other is the one where you will setup your file/format preferences for each input scenario, date/time and most of the functional setup options.
On the top screen you'll notice the input (int mic), the recording time, the number of tracks (actually files - think of them as tracks on a CD), the battery status - basically either none (wall-wart mode), full, or fumes. Also showing is the number of channels - whether stereo or mono, the signal meter and the peak hold level With the 670 you have to let go of the days of the huge white backlit analog meters ala Pioneer RT-707, and just drive by the peak level value. If you clip the thing, "ov" is displayed. And it clips gracefully there's no digital holocaust, just good old fashioned distortion. The 670 supports MP2, MP3, WAV and BWF formats. The inclusion of MP2 was a wise compromise in my opinion because it offers something between the brutal treatment of high frequencies by MP3, regardless of bitrate, and the media consuming demands of WAV @ 10MB per minute for stereo 44.1kHz. Yes, it's still compressed audio, but it's darned good compressed audio at 384kbps maximum, which should do for most speech needs, especially if you're in a pinch, or are attempting to capture an extremely lengthy event. This brings up one area that the 670 does not currently address, but future versions possibly will (UPDATE: 3/29/04 - the PMD570 does), and that's timer-based recording. With Coaster, I record two talk shows every day off the radio via AppleScript. After 9/11/01 I recorded 3 days worth of MPR for a "digital snapshot" of that event. To make it manageable when listening back to it, I wrote an AppleScript to record in 30 minute chunks. I'm guessing Marantz will enable both timer based functionality - i.e. power up at 1:00 and go into record for one hour, then power down and, break on the fly every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, hour, whatever. With an on-board clock/calendar, I don't see why not. One setting that I would like to see have its own control is the number of channels. In my scenario, I record worship in stereo (fed by a dedicated post-fade mix off our Mackie SR32), and I record the teaching in mono. With Coaster I have to stop the recording, save and then switch modes before resuming recording. With the 670, the same holds true. What Marantz may do on future models is include 2 user presets that can be selected on-the-fly, which would allow you to setup one as stereo WAV, and the other as mono WAV and accomplish the switch dynamically. The 670 allows you to set what the setup should be for each input and channel combination. So you can setup the mono mic input to always record as 384k mono MP2, the stereo mic selection to use WAV, the RCA analog input to record 128k MP3, and so on. So, with the 670 you would have to stop, step the input selector to the new choice (for instance go from mono RCA to stereo RCA) to change to the new setting. I would like to see the Stereo/mono switch make an intuitive switch from whatever the stereo setting was, to the corresponding mono setting, i.e. if I'm doing 128k stereo MP3, when I go to mono it would change to 64k. The reason this makes sense to me, is I see disk based recorders as providing the unique ability of almost unlimited record times. We have had services that went 4 hours. I need a recorder that can keep up with that.
With the security cover in place.
User Interface - Analog Controls
The 670 offers high pass and band pass filters for the mic inputs (XLR or built-in) and I wasn't able to find any concise statements in the manual to tell me if the filters worked on the analog line input. But a simple test I performed by recording some sine wave sweeps told me they do not. The exact frequency and slope of these filters remains a mystery. The manual does not say and Marantz did not provide me with that information. The test I performed on the RCA inputs could have been run on the XLRs if I would have had a direct box at home. Other analog controls include a 20dB mic pad, and for dynamics there's both ALC and a Limiter There's an input lock, and this switch gets hidden beneath the option security cover that affixes via two philips screws. While there's good reasons to hide these controls in certain scenarios, I'd hate to see someone get stranded just because they didn't have a philips. I suggested to Marantz that they change these out for small thumbscrews. The row of buttons that begins with the INPUT selector is still visible after the security cover is attached, hence the reason for the INPUT LOCK button. Also on the top you will find the familiar CD-like transport controls. One thing I commented to Marantz on here was the speed (or lack thereof) of the cue system. During one gig I had to cue about four minutes into a track, which was the half-way mark, to check for an artifact. It took far longer than I cared for.
Mic Preamps & Analog I/O
As I've already stated, the inclusion of mic preamps takes the 670 a couple levels beyond a laptop based recording system mainly in regards to convenience. The quality of the mic pres leaves room for improvement, but at $700 street, I think there's plenty of room for an upgraded model in the $1,000 range with better mic pres, better A/D, etc.. Let me say that they are sufficient for most high schools demands, most pro-sumers usage, especially by providing phantom power. During one of my gigs, I was recording a high school concert, and I used a pair of ADK condensers (A-51's I believe) that they had. They were actually hot enough to clip the mic inputs on the 670. It was during this gig that I discovered that the pad was sub-optimal. I had not had the chance for a sound check, so I was flying totally blind, and when the first few notes sounded, I knew I was in trouble. When I flipped on the pad, the clipping cleared up, but the noise floor went through the roof. Not good. I passed this along to Marantz as something they'll want to look into. At this point, I do not recommend using the pads, because even with these ADK's that were hot enough to clip the preamps, the signal was barely usable after I engaged the pad. I had no issues with clipping from a pair of SM81's, or the Peavey PVM480's. The dual RCA jacks make the 670 a friend to the home user who may opt to use the 670 to digitize their vinyl collection. It offers a cleaner, simpler vehicle to do so. And in a pinch, a person could create MP3's very simply for limited use or one-off projects, like digitizing children's VHS video soundtracks for use in the car on long trips if you don't have a mobile VCR.Not resting on their laurels, D/M Pro got to work on an upgraded version that is now available, the PMD671, a 24 bit/96kHz version of the 670 with upgraded preamps.
Headphone Amp
The headphone amp on the 670 is a bit underpowered. It was sufficient for my ATH-910's, but a studio owner I demoed it for commented that based on the output of his Sony's that he tried, his AKG's would be unusable. I also found the headphone level control to be a challenge to operate quickly because it's so low profile. Both of these comments I passed along to Marantz.
(Update - the headphone level control just takes some using to get loosened up. After several gigs it was smooth as could be.)
All Things Digital
The 670 is, after all, a flash based recorder. I get a lot of reactions to the limited capacity of the current 1GB Compact Flash media that is readily available. 10MB per minute for stereo 44.1kHz audio, means a 1GB CF card is like 90 minute cassette. The good news is that, unlike cassette, a 1GB CF card is good for 180 minutes of mono 44.1kHz uncompressed audio. I believe they chose the best media for the job. 2GB and 4GB units are available, though the prices are still pretty high, the continued growth, and increase in the resolution of digital cameras should bring these prices in line in the future. The good news is, you don't need a CF for every gig. You only need enough of them to get you through a session until you can dump the data to your DAW, or at least your laptop - no more buying tape! It's important to remember that if your application is speech, that mono is fine, and as such only consumes 5MB per minute for uncompressed 44.1kHz audio. A typical church could probably get by on a pair of 512MB cards, which can be had for around $400 for the pair. The 670 offers S/PDIF in and out which ensures that you can interface it with just about any workflow. The 670 sports a USB 2.0 interface, that is Windows (98) and above only. Mac users, like myself, will have to rely on USB and FireWire based CF readers to access the files. This isn't a big deal to me, but I do see it as an oversight on their part of the fact that Mac users make up a disproportionate segment of the digital content creation folks, and that FireWire is far more prominent in high performance digital audio/video settings. Apple's single digit market share accounts for around 50% of the digital content creation jobs - print, web, video and audio.
What's Next?
The PMD570 has now been introduced. The 570 is a 1U rack mount version of the 670, minus the mic preamps. Here is a PDF with info on the 570.
The 570 from the back (image courtesy of Denon/Marantz Professional.)
Update - 12/5/05
Our church purchased the PMD-570 and it is Mac compatible. This makes it feasible to connect up and download the audio files to an iBook or PowerBook for post-production.
Also, the CDR420 HAS BEEN introduced (8/2/05). The 420 is an interesting piece because it's purpose is to offer all the flexibility and functionality of the 670, along with a CD burner - but no host computer is required. This means that you can capture, edit and burn all with one device all without a computer attached. Pretty cool!
The CDR420 (image courtesy of Denon/Marantz Professional.)
And now the PMD660.
Photo courtesy of Music Gear Review.
Unofficial photos on this U.K. Site
Thanks to Sam Bushell for his most excellent Progressify app, used on most images on this entire site along with; Thorsten Lemke's Graphic Converter, Adobe Photoshop and AppleScript!!
Last updated: 5/19/05
