MiniDisc: faithful servant whose time has passed

When I started recording audio for broadcast (12 years ago now), Digital Audio Tape, or DAT, was the standard. There’s a TASCAM reporter’s DAT deck here somewhere, and it served me well.

But within a few years, MiniDisc took over as the format of choice for many radio journalists as well as web producers. The media was cheap and readily available. Consumer-grade, portable MiniDisc recorders gave excellent results, ran off standard AA batteries, and were reasonably reporter proof. Some enterprising companies went as far as to develop adapter kits to run MiniDisc machines with pro microphones, and there was a even a pro-spec unit from HHB.

I do still use the studio MiniDisc as a backup for recording interviews – it performed a great service when a fragmented hard drive took down the computer workstation mid recording. But now that solid-state recorders are cheaper, better and more efficient for field work, the MiniDisc is on its way out.

The studio DAT deck is a better option for backup recording, and a CD is better for archiving. There are also solid-state studio recorders that look attractive, and one of those might go on the shopping list (not least because it will allow recordings in the studio, at the same time as someone else is editing on the computer system).

So the MiniDisc decks will be giving up their rack space when we move. But not before they’ve played out the music compilations at the office moving party.

Apple’s decision to rebrand the aluminium MacBook as a MacBookPro makes a lot of sense.

The lack of any real replacement for the original 12-inch PowerBook has long been a source of complaint for Mac users. At the same time, offering two different types of MacBook — plastic and aluminium — might have confused some buyers. Then there was the issue of connection options. The aluminium MacBook had neither the FireWire 400 connector of the white MacBook, nor the FW800 and ExpressCard options on the 15-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pros.

The new machine fixes both the marketing and the connectivity. The 13-inch model has a FireWire 800 port, so journalists using video cameras, as well as high-end audio hardware, can hook their kit up to the smaller MacBookPro. The new machine goes one better, and adds an SD card slot. This is reasonably common on consumer PCs, but it is a first for Apple.

The SD card slot is actually a pretty neat addition to the computer. Anyone working to deadlines knows how fiddly external card readers can be (try it perched on a chair at the front row of a keynote). At the same time, many digital cameras, audio recorders and video cameras now use SD cards.

Some users will complain that there is no ExpressCard slot. ExpressCard is useful, for example, to provide an additional FireWire connector for video sources whilst using the internal FireWire bus for external drives. But reporters working mostly in video will probably want the 15-inch or even 17-inch machines, with their larger screens and more powerful processors. The 13-inch MacBook Pro’s video hardware does not officially support Final Cut Pro in any case.

But as a step up from the white MacBook, the 13-inch model looks attractive. The more robust body would probably swing it for me, especially as the MacBook Pro weighs just a touch over 2kg. The SD card slot is a bonus, and at £899 the machine is not much more expensive than the recently updated (white) MacBook.

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Producing broadcast-quality interviews for podcasts and playback on websites is becoming, if not easier, then at least a little cheaper.

The growing range of solid-state audio recorders, designed mostly with musicians in mind, provide plenty of the features needed for capturing good-quality sound in the field. These portable recorders offer a viable alternative, both to ageing Minidisc recorders and DAT machines, and to digital devices designed for the office dictation market.

The DR-07 from Tascam is the latest to find its way into our kit bag. This handheld stereo recorder is small and light (125g), but has a pair of good-quality condenser microphones, a connector for an external mic, a separate line input and a clear screen with an easy to use interface.

The Tascam’s long, thin shape doesn’t always make it the easiest device to keep in a pocket, but it has the advantage of making it easy to point the microphones at the talent and still keep all the controls to hand. In fact, for on the hoof interviews, the DR-07 is simplicity itself. Press the power button to turn the device on, press record once to “arm” it (this also starts the pre-record function) and once again to record. At the end of a take, pressing record again pauses the device. Recordings can be 44.1kHz or 48kHz, 16 or 24 bit WAV, or MP3.

The audio quality from the built-in microphones is very good indeed (if any readers are interested, I will be able to put up some samples on this website as well as links to published work using the DR-07). But as they are condenser microphones, they are quite sensitive. This means monitoring on headphones is a must, not least to ensure that no handling noise comes through on the recording.

Our experiences with external microphones were mixed, at least at first. A range of professional XLR mics produced a horrible buzz using an XLR to stereo minijack cable, although a Sony minijack mic and a Rode M3 condenser both worked without a glitch. Switching the cable to a mono jack to XLR solved the problem. Clearly the DR-07 is sensitive to the way the mic connectors are wired up, in a way that other recorders are not.

Once this problem was solved, the Tascam produced very decent results with a range of microphones, certainly on a par with Minidisc recordings. The fact that the unit records on to low-cost SD cards, and comes with a 2GB card in the box, is a bonus. It also uses two AA batteries, which again are available almost everywhere. These are points that are almost as important as raw audio quality for a journalist in the field.

There are other contenders in the portable recorder space – in particular the Edirol R09HR, which offers a higher-quality, 96 kHz recording mode, Olympus’ LS-10 and the more feature-rich but more expensive Tascam DR-100. But for under £200, ready to go out of the box, the DR-07 is a very good starting point for audio journalism.

Tascam DR-07 portable audio recorder