Professional-Grade Audio Recording With A PDA

matt-fu writes "For a long time, live recording has been consigned mostly to the realm of DAT recorders, Minidisc recorders, or laptop computers. On one hand you have subpar sound quality, on the other you have a bulky rig with a big 'steal me' sign attached. Thanks to the folks at Core Sound though, mobile recording is about to take a huge leap forward with their PDAudio project. By using a hardware card that allows recording via S/PDIF onto Compact Flash, you will be able to use your iPaq or Zaurus alongside a decent A/D converter to portably get field recordings at up to 24bit/192kHz. The site includes WinCE screenshots, and there are Linux clients in the works as well."

Comments

Thanks a lot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we can expect a special music piracy tax on PDA's as well.

Great

[Flunitrazepam]

With this, and cell phones the size of postage stamps that can stream live video, we are reaching a point where people are going to have to assume they are being recorded or filmed at all times.

Re:Size Limitations

[jandrese]

I wonder if they're going to include some form of lossless compression (like flac) on the sound to squeeze more bits out of the 4GB CF card mentioned in the article. As it stand, you can only get about an hour of uncompressed 2 channel 192 Kilosample 24 bit audio on there. With compression it should be easy to get 2 hours out of the card. If you use a lossy compression (like ogg) it should be trivial to get many many hours on a 4GB CF card.

Hello? A to D converter?

[PhyrePhox]

This is not an all-in-one solution. You'll still need an encoder, and frankly, a portable DAT or MD recorder is: smaller; a single finished piece; designed specifically for this purpose; and (at least in the case of the MD recorder) much cheaper than a iPaq/A-D converter/this funky card.

Re:Provessional-Grade Video Recording With A PDA

[van der Rohe]

Minidisk uses ATRAC compression, however, so it's not the same quality as DAT for example, which can record at CD quality (16 bit, 44.1 kHz.)

This PDA solution appears to provide high-quality sampling rates/bit depth without relying on compression.

Woo! 7 Minutes of audio on a 512M CF!

[Anonymous Coward]

24kbits*192KHz*2channels = 1.152 MB a SECOND. If you compress it, then whats the point of having such high fidelity anyways? Your 512M CF card is going to hold 7 minutes of audio data.

Why not just buy a portable minidisc recorder, which is smaller than a PDA, cheaper than a PDA, would probably have 10 times the battery life of this PDA-based monster, and has media that costs $2 a pop? Add to that the media lasts for a 74 minute recording at a quality that will definitely blow that PDA solution out of the water and you've got a complete waste of time.

I can't understand why most geeks would lambast the general public for falling for the Megahertz Myth, and yet they get all starry eyed when someone starts throwing preposterous specs out at them. Do you honestly think that you can get an appreciable difference between 16/44 and 24/192 outside of a professional studio?

This product is targeted at clueless audiophile wannabes. Unless you are one, move along.

Pro-Quality Audio? Sure...

[Dynedain]

You can have SPDIF, DAT, you name it....but if the mic sucks....so will the audio

Re:Wrong

[Mononoke]

This is "professional" grade audio by the standards. S/PDIF is not *professional grade*. AES/ABU on a 110 ohm cable is. S/PDIF is considered "consumer" grade. No XLR cables, no pro... that's how it goes.

Not necessarily. They are only two different ways to carry the same digital signal. (AES/EBU is balanced signal, S/PDIF is unbalanced.) Yes, you want AES/EBU for longer cable runs to keep data loss to a minimum, but S/PDIF is perfectly suitable for short distances. Such as: From the Mic preamp in one jacket pocket to the PDA in the other. No need for balanced signal for that short a distance.

Yes, I Am An Audio Technician (IAAAT).

Re:Good!

[Mononoke]

If record companies were smarter, they'd record all the concerts themselves. I mean, you already have a full audio setup for sound reenforcement. With just a little extra effort it could be setup to do a good job recording, or for 0 extra effort a DAT can by plugged into the main output and that captured.

Already being done by most bands, but only as a reference tape used to judge the quality of their performance.

Have you ever heard a 'board tape', as these are called? The mix is usually terrible because the show is being mixed to sound good for the paying audience, not the tape. Mixing a live concert and mixing to tape are two very different things. Real 'live-recordings' are recorded on separate consoles located away from the arena, at great added expense.

(Why are board tape mixes bad? Mixing a live show involves combining the sound coming out of the PA with the sound coming off stage (Huge guitar stacks and expensive snare drums are the worst offender in this regard.) The board tape is only getting half of what the audience heard.)

(Yes, I mix live audio for a living.)