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>> Hey I'm Donald Bell, Senior Editor for Digital Audio and MP3, and today we're taking a First Look at the Edirol R-09 portable Audio Recorder. It is one of the smallest portable audio recorders you've ever seen. But as far as being a high-end portable audio recorder I wanna say that, I mean that it's capable of recording up to 24-bit, 48 KHz resolutions, has great built-in microphones, line-input jack, microphone jack. Now compared to something like the Sony PCM-D50, you can see how this is a much smaller, much more pocketable device. Other player that it competes against is a less expensive player made by Zoom called the H2. The H2 is a little bit cheaper-feeling and the microphone that's included on the R-09 are much better. So what we like about the Edirol R-09's design, aside from the fact that it's so small, it has great little controls on the back of the player. Another thing we like about the R-09's design is that it has an input level adjustment button. The screen on the Edirol R-09 is not too big. It's about an inch wide. The screen is kind of useless in broad daylight, the good news is that with automatic gain control settings and a really bright and easy to find record button, you'll probably never really need to look at the screen. Some drawbacks of the R-09, battery life isn't so great. It's about 4 hours of recording time. Another thing we didn't like is its price is around $390 which compared to something like the Zoom H2. It's not quite a bargain. One last thing we didn't like about the R-09 is that the record button is this bright blinking red button and if I sneak the R-09 somewhere, the giant blinking record button will, kind of tip people off that you're making a recording. The bottom line is that the R-09 is a great little recorder, and its size is one of the smallest that we've seen and the recording quality of the built-in microphones is as excellent. The down side is that it's still pretty pricey for what you get. I'm Donald Bell, and that was a first look at the Edirol R-09 portable audio recorder.
