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.