Review: Marantz PMD 671

Instructions are wonderful things. These days most gadgets come with a manual the size of a telephone directory, some even come in several languages other than the Queen’s English. Fantastic. But does that mean we read them? If you’re like me then chances are you’ll leap straight in and start flicking various switches on whatever piece of electronic hardware you’ve just bought before realising you’ve set the VCR to a spin cycle and programmed the microwave to record Neighbours.

Then there’s the situation where the user manual fails to point out a key fact that leads to chaos, confusion and a potential nervous breakdown (well some mild annoyance anyway). Both of these fates befell me when the shiny new Marantz PMD 671 recorder arrived on my doorstep. After feeding it a stack of batteries and sliding in a 1GB Compact Flash card, I grabbed a mic and began recording myself in the office. The results were appalling. Hiss, distortion, and aural artefacts clouded the recording, so I grabbed the manual and looked at a few diagrams on setting record quality. Then I pressed a few more buttons and mumbled some more. Oh dear. I still sounded like I was trapped down a well with a sick cat. This scenario was repeated for several minutes until, in a moment of sheer madness, I read the instructions properly. It was then that I discovered the power of the ‘Store Settings’ button and realised that I’d been recording myself as a 32k MP2 file. Genius.

The reason for recounting this sad tale of woe is to illustrate that even the most wonderful device can be brought to its knees by an idiot at the controls or by poor instructions.

SOLID STATE AFFAIRS

The PMD 671 is in many ways a wonderful device. Many moons ago, when I was a cub reporter in local radio, I used a Marantz pro cassette recorder for all my hot scoops. It had great recording quality (for its time), was light and manageable and fairly sturdy. The PMD is the 21st Century update. It has a similar look to the older analogue machine and is based on a chassis used by the company’s professional MiniDisc machine. You can even see where the disc hatch used to be.

As an aside: I am someone who has used humble domestic MD Walkmans to record audio from radio interviews to sound effects over the years and I never saw much point in the pro version of domestic formats. An engineer once warned me off falling for the lure of the word ‘professional’ scrawled across equipment based on consumer technology. But the 671 earns its ‘pro’ tag by using the solid state format, with .wav recording up to 96kHz, 24-bit, along with MP2 and MP3 options. It comes with an impressive spec sheet for a fairly small and low-cost package: balanced XLR microphone connections with phantom power, auto and manual record controls with limiter, mic attenuation, pre record buffer, USB connectivity, post record monitoring and so on. It’s a long list.

The main controls and record level dial are well laid out and reassuringly chunky, with a quality feel to them. There’s a clear LCD with backlight, and while some settings are accessed via a menu system, others such as limiter and record buffer are controlled via a set of hardware switches on the top of the unit. It’s perhaps an indicator of the Marantz’s radio newsroom heritage – and one of its intended markets – that both the switch panel and the memory card slot can be blocked off using screw-on covers to prevent hacks from either buggering up the settings or ‘forgetting’ to replace the CF card.

There is something to be said for having a bank of neat buttons that lets you see how the machine is set up without having to scroll through countless menus and sub-directories, although this is necessary for some of the key functions, such as record format and quality. And this is where another problem reared its head. In normal use the LCD does not display your chosen sample rate and file format. After dumping a few recordings on to a PC I found that I was getting a different sample rate in mono than I was in stereo. Eh?

It took several minutes of fiddling to discover that you actually have to set up the sample rates and formats for mono and stereo individually. I could find no direct mention of this point in the manual and quite why you would want to record a mono interview at 44k and stereo atmos as an MP2 beats me, but you could find yourself doing this. But for most users, once they’ve set the machine up to suit their needs, they’ll probably leave it like that for good.

OUT & ABOUT

The first task for the PMD was some basic sound effects recording of general street noise with a beyerdynamic MCE 86 shotgun mic. The results were impressive. I had recently tried out an Edirol R1 digital recorder and the Marantz quickly showed itself to be worth the extra cash. There was very little noise coming from the mic input, unlike the Edirol, which was hampered by a disturbing amount of hiss. To be fair, the R1 is a lot cheaper and smaller that the 671 and has to make do with a mini-jack input, but it did illustrate that solid state alone does not guarantee a perfect recording.

What also stood out was how simple the Marantz is to use, with those chunky controls being easy to manage and the LCD giving a clear representation of the levels. The machine will tell you if you’ve clipped, and it gives a reading of the highest peak level reached during a recording. Back at base I plugged in the supplied USB lead and connected the unit to a Windows XP PC, which recognised the machine as a removable drive and let me open the files in my DAW. The recordings were clear and sharp with very little noise or hiss.

A few days later came a far more challenging job. Some colleagues and I were recording a 5.7 litre Corvette car on a rolling road in a soundproofed chamber. The car was lashed to the rolling road and two AKG C414 microphones were set up, front and rear, with cables running into the chamber’s control room and straight into the PMD 671. A second Marantz was put to use in a roving capacity coupled with an Audio-Technica stereo mic to record from the car’s numerous nooks and crannies. Finally the Corvette was fired up (with exhausts removed for extra bark) and the recording began. We thrashed the Corvette for most of the session and I can report that he had no major issues with the recorder at all. The final audio was all well defined and noise free, with the energy of the big American motor captured to a T.

The third task for the recorder was to record an interview for a speech-based audio CD. The recording lasted around an hour, using an AKG mono reporter’s mic, and was the kind of thing that a MiniDisc would have been used for in the past (and for many reporters, still would be). Again the Marantz performed well. The controls were all easy to manage, the levels easy to check and the recorded voice was detailed and clear, with just the right amount of natural sibilance. And with this being a solid-state device, there was no machine noise, despite the quiet atmosphere of the room.

So, in a few quite different recording sessions, using a range of microphone types the Marantz performed well in all of them. We used alkaline batteries or mains power, although a rechargeable pack that replaces the standard battery holder is an optional extra. Personally, I’d either buy some separate rechargeable batteries or stick to alkaline, because if the Marantz pack dies on you out in the field and you’ve left the plastic battery holder at home, you can’t even pop to a garage to stock up on Duracells.

MARANTZ PANTS

I can wholeheartedly recommend the Marantz PMD 671. Any machine that offers this range of features is bound to suffer from complex menus and settings. But the quality of its build and standard of its recordings allow it to rise above that. I have not used any of the more expensive solid-state recorders on the market but at a guess I would say the 671 sits between the small Edirol and some of the costlier offerings. I run a business where every penny spent has to make its mark and I have just bought a Marantz. I’ve even read the instructions.