I just acquired a new Tascam DR-100MKII PCM recorder to record the live performances of my wife's bands. One's a jazz trio, the other a rock and roll covers band. She plays the drums. (I'm her roadie.) The bands like to review their performances, so one of these little hand-held recorders with built-in microphones is just the ticket. The recorder was delivered yesterday. After a few minutes of reading the instruction manual I set the Tascam on a coffee table about 8 feet from my wife's "rock" drum kit, with the mics hanging off the end of the coffee table, and I asked to her to jam for a few minutes.
She's a very a dynamic and powerful drummer, and the peak LED was lighting up on rim shots while she played, so I have some work to do on setting levels, but this was just meant to be a very informal test of how the Tascam sounded.
After she played a couple of sets we went upstairs to the family room, and using just the analog output feeding the analog input of my Benchmark HDR we listened to the recording. Frankly, neither one of us was expecting much.
Wrong. Dead wrong. It is the best solo drum recording we've ever heard. On my Salon 2 / DD18+ system it was 95% realistic. It's amazing. I didn't think my system could accurately reproduce her larger drum kit, and I've said so on AH a couple of times. Wrong again. The recording was absolutely convincing. I think we could still easily tell which were the live drums if they were side-by-side with the audio system, but the sound is so close to real it amazed both of us. And all I did was set a $250 handheld recorder on a coffee table, guessed at the right gain, and pressed the record button. What commercial recordings do to drums should be considered a crime against humanity.
I can't wait to try this out for the full jazz trio.
For now I just have the most amazing demo track I've ever heard.
