Review on Tascam DR-70D DSLR Camera Portable Audio Recorder - Enhanced 4-Track Capability by Wagner Witlin

I'm an amateur musician and I still record with a computer interface and special preamps, Audiofire 12 and ART Pro MPA II Reference. The recording quality is very high, but the process involves using a 30-foot cable between my music room, where my grand piano and harpsichord are, and my home office, where my desktop computer and recording equipment are. A line 30 meters long goes along the entrance to the house, which is quite inconvenient when receiving guests. The line also means my home office door won't close. And the computer isn't completely silent either, even though it's 30 feet away from us. My husband has never been pleased at the presence of a snake in the stairwell. In terms of workflow, I also don't want to go to another room to turn on the computer and record myself. When I'm gaming the last thing on my mind is computer, closing all processes on the computer, turning off sleep mode and so on. Sometimes I do a lot of takes - over 20 at a time - and then review and edit the footage on the computer. Sometimes I go back to playback/recording from the computer if I don't like something. Or too often I just call it a night. Music is more of a nightly hobby for me. I bought the DR-70D with the intention of putting it next to my instruments and using it constantly on location so I could easily start and stop takes without having to go to my home office. However, writing to SD cards meant I'd have to insert and remove an SD card from the DR-70D hundreds, if not thousands, of times over the life of the unit to transfer the footage to my computer. As soon as I unpacked the DR-70D, I opened the flap, which contained AA batteries and an SD card. The discovery was counterintuitive, to say the least. It's held on by some kind of flexible tape that you just want to break. It was immediately apparent that the memory card/battery door would not withstand hundreds of openings and closings as I had planned. I put the DR-70D back in the box. I did not record or rate the quality of the preamps or A/D converters as I was confident that the build quality made the unit unsuitable for my use. Instead, I ordered a Tascam DA-3000. , which is hopefully better built in terms of the map door and slots. However, it is much larger and more expensive, 2.5 to 4 times the price of the DR-70D depending on the sales of each model. The DA-3000 also doesn't have any built-in preamps, which means I have to get the ART preamp out of the recording room as well. And finally, I need some sort of rackmount case for the DA-3000 and ART preamp to use in the music room, since my home office doesn't have any rackmount furniture, just A/V home theater shelves and other equipment that I don't move want. That means I'll be spending over $1000 on my computerless recorder and it won't be portable, but I didn't really care about portability. aspect first. I also don't have to fiddle with batteries or battery packs. At least for this amount I get 192 kHz converters. The DR-70D only plays 96kHz. The Windows drivers for my Audiofire 12 also only support 96kHz, even though the hardware supports 192kHz. And of course the DA-3000 also supports DSD recording. So overall I should get a much better recording quality than the DR-70D can offer.