Recording device advice for sampling

I’m looking for a small battery powered device to record ambient sounds. I’m not sure I’ve got the term right, but I want to record an audio waves transmitted through air. This is so I can create samples and transfer to other devices.
I see the prices vary a lot, like a zoom h1 for £69 to £300+ for an h6
What do others use to sample?

I have a h1, pretty cool little device. windsock is a must though

if u already got a smartphone, its actually pretty good for this type of thing.

I concur with the doctor, @docshermsticks
AudioShare app on the iPhone is great for field recording and makes it handy to catalog your audio files on the go. I use that for most of my ambient sampling.

i use a tascam dr40. it’s great. useful for more than just recording ambient sounds.

the tascam looks complicated. It looks like i need to read up on it

tascam complicated? you would have starved to death in the days of the VCR video recorder.




In addition to ambiant recording, I’d like to be able to go round to my friend’s house and record some riffs from his amp or his mixing table.


What recording device would you recommend on a budget of £150?

I’m actually in a similar market myself. I love my microcassette recorder, but it’s suitably noisy, and shitty sounding.

The dr-40 caught my eye on account of its dual record feature which lets you record 2 simultaneous tracks identical, except one is higher gain than the other. So you can get max gain, but still be protected from overs without using a limiter…

Thing is, maybe I should just keep it simple and get an h1 for its small size, low price, and simplicity.

Anyone who particularly likes or dislikes a certain model of recorder would be welcome to chime in here.

There are plenty of models to choose from, and plenty of reviews out there… But it’s hard to know without experiencing one.

shame Sony pulled out of that market as the PCM-M10 had everything. I hear good things about the Tascam DR-05 but, as with the Zoom H1, have reservations about its handling of line-level signals. I’ve been recommending the H1 but the line-in quality is a deal-breaker for me. Head over to taperssection where recorders like these get discussed a lot.

shame Sony pulled out of that market as the PCM-M10 had everything. I hear good things about the Tascam DR-05 but, as with the Zoom H1, have reservations about its handling of line-level signals. I've been recommending the H1 but the line-in quality is a deal-breaker for me. Head over to taperssection where recorders like these get discussed a lot.

Yo dude. Yeah, I keep reading about the pcm-m10… Going for a mint now.

I guess at the end of the day sound quality is most important… I don’t think I’ll be lining in so much, more interested in recording with mics… But I’ve been over at taperssection, and I can’t see any firm consensus on a currently produced, reasonably priced unit which has the ADC, preamp, and sound quality of the pcm-m10… :’(

@ludicrouSpeed that’s not necessarily a bad thing, not everyone needs the pristine quality that the PCM-D100 offers now. Definitely something to trust your ears about. Olympus LS-12/LS-14 and Marantz PMD-620mk2 have dedicated line-in jacks. I’ve never used them. I did see a couple of used pcm-m10-s priced around “as new” level on Ebay. The m10 takes a lot of beating, mine has sat by train tracks and dropped from great height, and lived to still be used in production, the Rec level knob and back switches tend to go first.

all the zoom/tascm/sony handheld digital recorders under $200 have excellent quality sound, are so easy to use and are dirt cheap.
some features will suit you better than others, but you can’t go wrong. just buy one.

@ludicrouSpeed that's not necessarily a bad thing, not everyone needs the pristine quality that the PCM-D100 offers now. Definitely something to trust your ears about. Olympus LS-12/LS-14 and Marantz PMD-620mk2 have dedicated line-in jacks. I've never used them. I did see a couple of used pcm-m10-s priced around "as new" level on Ebay. The m10 takes a lot of beating, mine has sat by train tracks and dropped from great height, and lived to still be used in production, the Rec level knob and back switches tend to go first.
all the zoom/tascm/sony handheld digital recorders under $200 have excellent quality sound, are so easy to use and are dirt cheap.
some features will suit you better than others, but you can't go wrong. just buy one.

Hey, thanks guys. Yeah, I kinda wish I could ab a few. But the H1 sounds good, better than tascam dr05 for voice according to a YouTube video comparison. That little voice just kept saying to me “just buy any one and stop wasting time researching them”… Hahah, man. What a shmuck I can be. It was just the moment of getting to that realisation that the pcm-m10 was supreme and then also realising it’s discontinued, and 4 times the price of a H1 / dr05 kinda price range.

So I think I’ll listen to a couple more comparison vids and then pull the trigger on one of the cheaper ones.

As stupid as it sounds, the H1 in white matches my op1, and my new sony XB-30 portable speaker. Aesthetics, bruz

it’s not so much a matter of “just buy any one and stop wasting time researching them” —it’s more a case of you can’t go wrong. you’ll love whichever one you buy.






keep in mind when the m10 was around, most people still preferred the zoom h2, i think because of the price…

Good tips!

you know, @awesome_o I was going to buy a dr40 for that purpose and somehow ended up talking myself into the dp-008. haven’t tried it for field recording, but I do need it for the 8-track.

Picked up a grey zoom H1 today along with the accessories pack. So far so good. Tiny footprint, and for some reason it hadn’t occured to me, but this will also be super handy as a highly portable, high quality (relatively speaking) mic for recording direct into the op1. Ie. High gain into the line in on the op1 = much lower noise.

Auto level function seems great.

Not sure what sampling rate to use… I think for now I’ll try 96k wav, cause why not… Unless I need to record a long thing.

I kinda wish you could track at low sampling rates to get that bit crusher sound, but I can always do that later. The high fidelity cannot be later added.

Looking forward to sampling every little found sound I come across.

<3

@ludicrouSpeed let us know how you get on with it - I’ve hear the H1 can get a bit of movement/body noise? I imagine that would be with any hand-held recorder to a certain degree tho…


Also, don’t buy into the 96kHz thing unless you are doing scientific testing - the science tells us thus nobody can hear the difference :slight_smile: