Settings for Marantz Portable Recorders

Pressing Edit brings up four pages of editable settings, 20 in all, which can be navigated by the up/down/left/right buttons that surround the Enter button. When the desired settings are edited, pressing the soft key that is now named EXIT will bring up a dialog asking whether to store this new configuration. Use the left and right keys to highlight YES, press enter, and the new settings are stored in that preset. It seems like one ought to be able to just start recording at this point, but a preset still needs to be loaded, so again, choose a preset, press enter, then enter again to select it.
This sounds like too many menu pages and button clicks, and it can get a little frustrating to have to navigate all those levels just to change an input setting, or file-type, but in practice, the most common recording setups can be stored in the three presets, and accessing those is relatively quick: MENU>>ENTER>>(select preset)ENTER>>ENTER. Yes, that’s five button pushes for even the simplest change, but if the desired preset is already loaded, recording can start with one press of the large REC button.
That button glows red when recording is underway, and recording does start with one press, there’s not an intermediate Record-Pause mode as with some recorders (which frequently leads to missed recordings.) There is a REC PAUSE button that will pause the recording, and the red record indicator will blink to indicate that status, but it’s highly recommended to avoid using the pause button. If one only uses RECORD and STOP, there’s less ambiguity about whether a recording is actually underway. The left-most soft button under the main display is marked TR during recording, and pressing it will start a new track. The middle soft button will toggle that same button to “undo” which will prompt a dialog to undo the most recent recording, so make sure the left button is set to TR if you’d like to make new tracks in the midst of recording. The right-most button will insert a mark at the time it’s pressed. Those marks can be used later to navigate through the file when playing the audio on the recorder, but they do not move with the soundfile when it’s transferred to a computer for editing.

Marantz and it's part in Field Recording

Portable field recorders have changed dramatically in the years since the Marantz PMD 660 was released. Even back in 2005, it was not the first flash-memory based field recorder, but it was the earliest to offer professional features such as XLR mic inputs and phantom power in an affordable and compact package. What seemed like a conveniently tiny box then looks impractically large today, now that there are high-quality recorders that can fit in a shirt pocket. But there still are some advantages to a larger form: XLR mic inputs take up space, so do large displays and speakers.

The original PMD 660 had some downsides: the mic preamps were hissy and would distort with high-output mics, the mini headphone jacks were prone to shorting out, the built-in microphones were practically useless, and pins in the Compact Flash memory card slot would occasionally bend, rendering the machine inoperable. Despite those problems, it has remained a popular recorder because it was easy to use, fairly durable, and sounded good enough for many situations. Some popular marantz recorders can be found here.

Marantz has updated the PMD 660 with the PMD 661 and the good news is that it’s a major improvement all around. While it still resembles the 660, it’s slimmed down a little, and most of the major issues that plagued the original have been solved. The mic preamps are much cleaner, the headphone jack is now a much more solid-feeling quarter-inch jack, and the memory card type has been changed to SD, which doesn’t have pins that are as likely to bend.