Episode: 1844
Title: HPR1844: The Marantz PMD 660 Professional Solid State Recorder
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1844/hpr1844.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 10:01:22

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This is HBR Episode 1844 entitled The Marant's PMD 660 Professional Solid State Recorder.
It is hosted by John Kulp and is about 15 minutes long.
The summary is, I talk about the recording device I inherited from my mother-in-law and use it to record the show.
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Hey everybody, this is John Kulp and Lafayette Louisiana.
I'm recording on a brand new device, well it's not brand new but it's new to me.
This is a Marant's professional solid state recorder model number PMD 660.
I have this device on account of an unfortunate event.
My mother-in-law died about three months ago and among her possessions was this recorder
and they thought I would like to have it since I do this kind of thing.
My mother-in-law had it because she was an oral historian and she had bought a really nice microphone
and recorder to use when she went out to do interviews and characteristically when she had the stroke
that she died from. She was on the other side of the world and presenting a paper at a conference
in Morocco. This presented some difficulties but we sorted it all out.
But anyway, she was an amazing woman and she had a PhD in Asian studies.
I think she earned the PhD in the late 1960s and was fluent in about a dozen languages including
Arabic and Chinese and really hard languages like that.
And so what she did for a living in her later years was to act as a travel guide to people visiting
places like the Far East or she worked for the US State Department also and conducted foreign
visitors especially Chinese visitors on tours of America. And so she was constantly traveling
all around the world and making good use of her language skills. One of the most interesting jobs
she had was to act as the guide for bailiff and the flex tones when they went on their tour of the
Far East. And so yeah, an amazing woman. I was very very sorry when she passed away and I'm happy
to have however this recorder and I will think of her fondly whenever I use it.
Right now I'm using the internal microphones and so I'll do a more thorough review of the
device I think when I get to my office but I wanted to do at least part of this recording
using the internal microphones because this was marketed I think to like journalism professionals
originally so that like reporters when they went out in the field to do interviews they would
take this along with them and make really high quality recordings of interviews and stuff.
Right now I'm sitting in my car port you can probably hear some environmental sounds
like the car going down the street right now and I've got a very high tech setup. The recorder
is sitting on a plastic chair in the car port and I'm sitting on another plastic chair.
The cat food bowl is over there to my right and the cat water bowl is just next to it.
I think the microphones actually sound pretty good. The reviews I've read say that you get much
better result if you plug in an external microphone to it but I did a brief test while I was
still up in New York. I brought this back with me from New York recently. My mother-in-law's apartment
was in New York City and after they cleaned out the apartment they brought what belongings they
thought some of the family might want back to my brother-in-law's place in kind of upstate
upstate just a little bit outside of Manhattan they live in a suburb there so anyway we went to
visit them last week and I brought this back with me but I did a little bit of test recording while
I was up there. It's a solid state recorder you have to put in a compact flash card it's a very
large version of an SD card I guess. Nowadays if you get a new Moranse recorder I bet it records to
either an SD card or a micro SD card and I think you can get some kind of adapters like a compact
flash adapter where you could put an SD card or micro SD card and get a little more recording time.
The storage card that my mother-in-law had in the machine was four gigabytes and at the time she
bought it that was one of the larger cards I think. This device retailed for about $600 if I
read correctly and she had with it a microphone audio-technica microphone that I'll use when I
get to the office a little bit later so that you can hear the difference there. Okay so I think I will
conclude this portion of the show about the Moranse professional recorder now and then do the
rest of it when I am sitting in my office using a plugged-in microphone.
Okay I'm back and now I'm at my office and I'm using the microphone that my mother-in-law left
with the recorder. This is audio-technica I can't read them on something 710. It's a regular microphone
it's not USB so it's got an XLR input and one of the advantages of this Moranse professional recorder
over my Zoom H1 is that it accepts XLR microphone inputs. The Zoom H1 is too small and doesn't have room
for that so you can plug in a mini plug microphone but you can't do an XLR mic. The larger Zoom
recorders like the H4 I believe will accept up to two microphone inputs using XLR connections and
this one also has two inputs. I've been experimenting for the last 20 minutes trying to find a decent
microphone sound using this mic and I could use a quick course from our studio guy upstairs but he's
not around. This is still the summer vacation and so he's not here to tell me exactly what would be
the best settings to use. What I have found and I read about a little bit is that if I get closer
like this then the low end gets boosted abnormally and so I probably want to stay a little bit further
back for a more natural sound. So as far as this Moranse recorder there are a number of things I
like about it. Well first I'll say the things I like and then the things I don't really like.
One it's got lots of physical buttons that are dedicated to do certain things. It's got a
slider switch to turn it on. It's got a dial to change the microphone level and it's got a
I wish I knew the technical terms for these. I need NYBEL's help here but it's got for the headphone
volume it's got a knob kind of thing that's recessed in there instead of using like buttons to go
down down down up up and so forth. It has a backlight that you can turn on for the display. It's got
editing on board capabilities. I've not tried any of this because frankly I would rather just
transfer the audio over to my laptop and then use audacity to do the editing but in a pinch
you could splice things together, edit things out and stuff like that.
The built-in microphones I think sound pretty good but I don't know that they sound better than
the ones I have on the Zoom H1. The downsides for this the price is pretty high. The Zoom I got for
less than $100 and it sounds excellent using its built-in stereo condenser mics or using
another kind of microphone. What I do normally if I want to use my Sure SM58 mic over there,
I will run it through my little mixer here on my desk and then make the outputs of the mixer go
into the mini plug on the side of the Zoom. Here I don't have anything at all going in between the
mic and the device. The device itself has the phantom power that's needed to power the microphone
and it's got XLR input for the mic and so it's going straight into the recorder and I suppose
that would be an advantage in that you don't have to have more than one component to use one of these
XLR microphones. Downside is the power requirement is much higher for this than it is for the Zoom H1
which runs on a single AA battery if you're on battery power. This takes four AA batteries
or you can use it like I have it right now plugged into the wall using an AC adapter.
What else? I don't like the compact flash storage. That's kind of a legacy storage type now and so
it will be harder and harder to find new storage cards or probably the best thing to do would be
to find a decent adapter and then just keep using SD cards with the adapter. The Zoom H1 takes a
micro SD card and I've got a 32 gig one in my Zoom right now and I think that's why I can record way
more. This seems to have more there excuse me there are three presets that you can use to set up
different parameters for recording so I think by default the first preset uses the internal microphones,
the second preset records in stereo using the external microphones and then the third preset
uses external microphones recording mono and one of them you can switch between wave or MP3
also and of course you get different recording times based on what you choose. There are quite a
few parameters inside each preset that you can change and save according to your liking and so
that's pretty cool I guess. The Zoom H1 does not have any presets you have to simply change
parameters each time you want to change them. Whereas this one you can have fairly complex
personalized settings and switch rapidly but from one to the other so that's kind of cool I guess.
At the time this came out this is about a 10 year old recorder I believe it came out in 2005
and so for that time it was probably about the best you could get. The Zooms are much cheaper even
the Zoom H4 is a whole lot cheaper than this I think it's something like $250 or $300 my H1 was
only $90, $95 and from I would definitely not have bought a Morance professional recorder myself
but having inherited it I'm very happy to have it. I'd not tried it yet doing any kind of live recording
of a music event which it looks like it would be entirely possible to do that because you can plug
two microphones in here and you could have them set up at either side of the stage I don't know
eight or ten rows back for a classical recording is probably what you would do but
not sure what else to say it's definitely it's not as portable as the H1 either. I keep the H1
in my bag at all times and I never even know it's there it's so small in light whereas this is
fairly large and at least at the moment requires an AC adapter and an external microphone and all
this stuff so it's not ideal you could if you had the batteries you could carry just the device all
by itself and do interviews with it and stuff like that and it would sound good but I don't know I
think overall I prefer my Zoom over this but it's always fun to have a new toy to play with and
I'm happy to have this microphone also this audio technique of microphone retailed for $349
and I would certainly never have paid that much for a microphone but I'm glad to inherit one
and I'll be curious to see how good it sounds compared to the other things that I've used in the past
anyway I think that's all I'm going to say for now about the Morant's professional solid state
recorder model number PMD 660 I will talk to you guys some other time bye
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