"Dan Gruner" wrote in message


"Thomas Bishop" wrote in message
gy.com...

"Erik" wrote in message
I'm a student about to enter a conservatory next year for classical
performance, and I'm looking at options for recording concerts,
master classes and other important events.

I just sold my D7 and bought a Nomad Jukebox 3. Haven't really
gotten into it yet, but I think it will be a great replacement.
Limitations of a DAT:

Tapes. Switching tapes every 60 minutes is a pain if the concert
lasts longer than an hour and has no good place to take the time to
switch. Real-time transfer. With the Jukebox I can transfer via USB
or Firewire, much faster than real time.

Availability of tapes. There's nowhere in my town that stocks DAT
tapes. No major electronics stores carry them either. I bought the
last of the stock in BestBuy once. You can order them through mail
order, but you'd better make sure you have plenty on hand at all
times.

The Jukebox will record in WAV format, so no worry about
compression. A 20 gig hard drive is enough to store at least a
concert, and that's all I ever need. There are several others such
as the iRiver, CoreSound, and I think SoundProfessionals has one
either out or on the way. I found the Jukebox to be the most
cost-effective.

For maximum cost-effectiveness, pick up a refurbed NJB3 from CL on eBay -
under $200 with warranty when they are available. There are at least three
up for auction right now.

One very important thing to consider if you go down the route of the
portable harddisk recorder such as The Jukebox is the quality of the
A/D (Analogue to Digital) converter inside them. I don't know a lot
about The Jukebox, but a professional DAT walkman is likely to have a
very high quality A/D inside it, maybe of higher quality than The
Jukebox. It is certainly worth giving this a high consideration,
since all your signals have to be converted into the digital domain.

No sweat in the case of NJB3. Its line inputs have about 85 dB SNR and
20-20 KHz response at less than 0.5
dB down if you optimize its input levels in a logical way - operate its
input at 0 dB gain. The NHB3's line inputs have good enough SNR and
sufficient gain reserves that some people turn up the gain, add a little
boost in the analog domain, and make relatively noise-free recordings of
louder affairs directly off of the output of high quality mics.

The NJB3 also has a optical digital input that provides even higher quality
operation with 3rd party external mic preamp/ADC component(s).

In the case of the NJB3 you've got a wide choice of formats. I needed to
make a recording at a banquet I was doing sound at, but I kinda-sorta was
somewhat unprepared (the band kept growing while I was doing the setup). My
NJB3 didn't have enough charge left in its battery to make me confident that
I could record the whole thing in Wav format. Sound quality was not an
overriding issue, so I made a 192 Kb MP3 which at least doubled the battery
life due to vastly reduced disk activity. This was at least as good as MD.

Normally, I can get about 8 hours record/playback of waf files on a pair of
batteries if they are fully charged. Power line operation extends maximum
recording time to absurd extremes.

As was previously mentioned, the NJB3 has both USB 1.1 and IEEE 1394
(firewire) interfaces. Over firewire .wav files transfer in a fraction of
real time. MP3 files really scoot!

Plus, you can always use a NJB3 the way most people use them, which is to
listen to a big library of tunes just about anywhere. I have several hundred
..wav files on mine, and still have a few gig left in reserve for recording.
This includes two complete cycles of the Beethoven symphonies, the hits of
Billy Joel, etc., etc.

BTW, if you are looking for some good 'phones for use with a NJB3, let me
recommend Sennheiser IE3s.