I was watching a movie on UHD and it had a song in the credits which I liked. I bought the soundtrack, but the one in the credits was superior.... so I decided I wanted to have a copy that I could play outside of the movie... but how? Years ago I used to solve that problem as my stereo system had a Compact Cassette recorder, but I don't have one working right now (I have one to repair; more on this later!), and even if I did it's not really a solution as I'd want to digitise it later. This started my quest. What did I want;
- A digital recorder which could...
- Make a recording of anything that was being viewed on my TV
- Preferably in any format and quality I wanted, including PCM, mp3 and DSD
- Record from a digital source
- Be digitally portable, that is not locked into the device or media
- Rack mountable and not look silly next to other rack mount gear, that is about 19 inches wide
First I started with a MiniDisc recorder. Finding one in a good state at a good price is hard in Australia these days, but I managed to... however I soon realised it was not going to work. While it did give me the multiple bitrates, it was (obviously) in ATRAC and transferring that to something else is really hard today unless you're prepared to re-encode it. Which I was not. So that was a pause on my MiniDisc adventure.
Briefly looked into just recording to a PC at this point, but really it wasn't what I wanted. Software solutions are generally questionable and can suddenly stop working if hardware or underlying software changes, and I wanted something that I could use while watching the source, so a PC interface would then require another screen..... and so on. So no.
Then I started looking into digital recorders. Loads of them around. Most of them amazing. But not many of them rack mountable. Most of the rack mountable were really too good for me. I just wanted stereo. Eventually I ran into one that almost fit the bill. The VocoPro SDR-4000. Does it do the job? Mostly. It's dual stereo, but there's no quality or format selection. Just MP3 192kbs. But at this point I had been searching for years, so I bought one. Was it good? Well good enough. But I'll rant more on this later...
