By Youngmoo Kim and Patrick Richardson

Pros

• Great recording quality in a wide variety of audio formats.
  
• Rugged, lightweight, very sleek design
  
• Flexible storage options (on-board HD, compact flash, external HD).
  
• Easy-to-navigate controls and menus.
  
• All input settings are software recallable (except trim knob).
  
• Backlit, high-resolution VU meter easy to follow in dark.
  

Cons

• Non standard line-out jacks and no ¼’’ input jacks, necessitating clumsy adaptors for non-XLR connectivity.
  
• Only one user configurable “quick setup” file allowed.
  
• Phantom power and mic channel pad are menu items, not physical switches.
  
• Array of “settings” lights on front-panel left are useless in the dark.
  

Summary
A fantastic unit for field recording, if you can afford it.

Review
We were very excited to field test the Sound Devices 722 Portable, High-Resolution Audio Recorder, which the company bills as “the ultimate DAT upgrade”. Although Sound Devices markets the 722 towards professional recording engineers as well as documentary and electronic news gathering (ENG) production, our tests focused primarily on its performance in music recording in both studio and live settings. For those of us who remember (fondly) the Tascam DA-P1 portable DAT field recorder, the 722 is a littler smaller, a lot more flexible, and just as pricey.

Our initial experiments with the 722 used a series of test sounds and ambient noises in an enclosed sound booth using the built-in mic input preamps with two different condenser microphones: a Behringer C8000 and an Audio Technica 4040SP. These tests were recorded at the unit’s highest-quality specification for monoaural recording: wav files at a sampling rate of 192kHz with 32-bit floating point samples. First, we recorded a series of cymbal hits until the sound completely faded out (almost a minute of stable vibration). The cymbal decay sounded wonderfully smooth, even in the quietest parts. Inspecting the digital files of these cymbal decays demonstrated no noticeable digital dithering, indicating that the recorder was taking advantage of the full dynamic range of 32-bit recording. We next tested the noise floor by recording ambient silence while raising the preamp gain from minimum up to maximum. Listening back to these gain tests, some wideband noise becomes audible when the gain goes over +50dB (but by this point the mic was picking up conversations outside the room!). We also tested the mic preamp’s limiter with hard cymbal hits: this created only a barely audible dipping on the loudest part of the cymbal attacks, while leaving them off predictably introduced some distortion. Throughout all of our testing, there were no discernable artifacts from toggling the backlight, using the menu click-wheel, or hard-drive noise, as you would expect in a professional quality unit. From these tests, we came away very impressed with the performance of the 722's mic-preamps. Given that most users won’t be recording explosions or drums, the limiters will be more than adequate in leveling out extreme wind or crowd noise in the field.

Next, Patrick (who plays drums) used the 722 to record several of his band rehearsals, bringing up the first (of a few minor) complaints. When setting the unit up in the dark, it is difficult to read some of the controls. Although the main screen is very clear (especially with the backlight and contrast raised), there is a small cluster of indicator lights (showing drive status, phantom power, etc) with small black labels. While it’s a nice idea to have such a “dashboard” on the front panel, the indicator lights are so bright they make impossible to read their labels. This seems to be a trivial problem but, while setting up the mics for recording, it became tedious to have to keep picking the unit up and shield the glare just to check the mic input settings. A better solution would be to have the icon labels backlit by the indicator lights. Patrick also attempted to set the unit up to watch the meters and time-code while drumming, but the bulky battery on the unit’s otherwise square body makes it impossible to stand the unit up on its back edge.

Patrick recorded one full 3-hour rehearsal using a single omni condenser mic in the center of the room as a mono 320 kb/s mp3 file to both the onboard hard drive and built-in Compact Flash card simultaneously. While this recording did exhaust the relatively small 96 megabyte flash card we used, it made nary a dent in the 722’s 40 GB internal hard drive, which continued to record even after the CF card was full. At another rehearsal, he recorded an assortment of sessions (a 20 minute set and a handful of 5 minute jam-sessions) as 192 khz 32-bit stereo files using a pair of Audio Technica 4040s in the room. Recording to an uncompressed format ate up a good portion of the internal drive, but with no dropouts or audio corruptions. Making these piece-wise recordings, however, brings up another small complaint with the design. While recording song-by-song, there were sometimes several false-stars in a row. The 722 has a handy ‘false-take’ quick-delete function (with a handy button shortcut), but it only deletes files in reverse order (from most recent to earlier takes). It is tedious, if not risky, to have to count backwards among several takes if you’re trying to clear up precious drive space. You can navigate the drives and view files, with the option to delete, but this process requires diving deep into submenus and doesn’t seem to offer timestamps (it would be helpful to know which recording was initiated 10 minutes ago).

Taking the 722 back to the computer, the unit performed flawlessly as a Firewire HD to transfer large audio files for post-production and archiving. It can also record directly to an external drive via Firewire. According to the manufacturer, multiple recorders can be linked in master-slave chains via a proprietary control protocol (C. Link), but of course we were unable to test this functionality with only one unit. The 722 can even be set to turn on and start recording whenever external power is applied (surveillance, anyone?).

The Sound Devices 722 is an excellent portable recorder flexible enough to be used in a wide variety of scenarios, though this brings up the last of our minor complaints. Using the unit in many different configurations would require changing the input and drive settings. Almost all of these settings are digital, and can be stored in a “quick setup” preferences file. The problem is that there’s only one “quick setup” allowed. There are several other factory presets the user can load (“film,” “reporter,” and “music”), but no room to make more than one of your own configurations.

The Sound Devices 722 is an incredibly simple and rugged portable recorder with solid connectivity and essentially universal audio file-format support. The only way it could be any more useful is if it had the capability to send live audio over Firewire, so it could function as a 2-channel audio interface in a pinch. But otherwise, the 722 is a fantastic portable audio recorder that will satisfy the needs of the most demanding sound engineers, if you can handle its pricetag (~ $2500).