Edirol R-09 Audio Recorder

Once in a while, we at Tech2 digress from our consumer electronics market and venture into high end gadgets and hobby products for the creatively inclined. Today we are looking at a product by Edirol, a division of Music Hardware industry stalwart Roland. It’s a stereo Audio recorder, which can be used by musicians and Djs of all caliber and kind. Sampling, field recording, sound effects, live recording etc. are some of the highly entertaining things you can do with this good looking thing. Let’s check it out.

Form and specs
This product fits very nicely into the palm of your hand (unless you’re a pixie). Clad in black matte all over, the thick rectangular body has an LED rimmed record button right at the center, surrounded by a 4 way silver pad with controls such as play/pause, track navigation etc. The top face has the two mics positioned facing out from the corners, covered by rigid stainless steel casing.

The back panel has a battery compartment, which houses 2 AA batteries. The battery life stated is 4 hours. Besides this we have small slider switches for various options like “lowcut”, “Mic gain”, “limiter” etc. We’ll look over these options in the performance section. The bottom face has a small flap that opens out, exposing a small USB input and an SD card slot. This product records MP3s and Wavs directly to SD card - we received a 256 MB one included in package. The bitrate of MP3s can be adjusted, also many other adjustments can be accessed and tweaked via a small 120x64-dot OLED screen that takes up the top half of the front face. The finish quality of the screen, buttons, corners etc. is all absolutely top notch. This recorder also works via AC power, adapter included.

Ergonomically also the R09 is designed well, with the central record button easily accessible with one hand grip. The side panels have volume level button on one face, and mic input levels on the other. On to the inner anatomy, we have a 24 bit, 44.1/48kHz AD/DA converter, thus the highest audio rate you can record is 24 bit, 48 kHz wavs. This is serious quality. For MP3 encoding, we have 64 -320kbps. The recorder comes with a headphone out on the top face, and also, on one side we have 1/8 inch mic (20kohms impedance) and a line in (17kohms impedance). Thus one can connect external mic or music instrument also to record.