New Toys

It seems like it has been hardly any time at all, but my trusty Zoom H4n was simply no longer cutting the mustard for my portable recording wants and needs. So the time came to upgrade! (...Before the end of financial year.)

So after much deliberation, I chose a Sony PCM-D50.

These have actually been on the market for a while, and don't appear to be in production anymore (?), which is a crying shame because from the looking around I've done this is still the best handheld recorder on the market. When I bought the Zoom it was both a great deal cheaper and had XLR inputs, which tipped the boat in its favour at the time, but aside from the occasional planned field recording trip the XLR inputs didn't get much use and my growing dissatisfaction with it prompted me to go searching for an upgrade.

I'm absolutely in love with it. Having both the monitor and record levels on such smooth-turning dials was the first thing I noticed and appreciated. The buttons as well are fantastic and near-silent - one thing that was always very annoying with the Zoom was how every button press was massively amplified, and how incredibly sensitive it was to any sort of handling noise. The start up time is a smidge faster than the Zoom, and the menus themselves nicer to navigate given the button layout. It also feels sturdier, despite weighing roughly the same as the Zoom with the batteries in. The benefits of an aluminium casing instead of plastic.

In terms of size it's about the same, although half the width, which saves space. It's about the same size as a Nintendo 3DS XL actually, so if you're in need of a case, they're cheap and easy to find. It also has 4GB of in-built memory which the Zoom lacks, although the tradeoff for this is being stuck with the Sony Pro Duo memory cards which are a lot pricier than the standard SDs.

The real value, of course, is in how much better the Sony's microphones sound compared to the Zoom's. The first and most obvious improvement being the significantly lower noise floor, which alone is worth the upgrade.  The microphone quality is really great bang for buck here, you would have to pay a heck of a lot more to get something better.

This is definitely supplanting the Zoom H4n in my bag. I'm hoping to at some point in the future to purchase another portable recorder with at least four XLR inputs for the more heavy-duty planned field recording sessions, at which point I'll retire the Zoom for good. Super excited to go do some spur-of-the-moment field recording with this thing!