Tascam DR-100 MKiii Field Recorder Review

[amirm]

This is a review and measurements of the Tascam DR-100 MKiii portable field recorder. It is kindly sent to me by a member and costs US $300 on Amazon including Prime shipping.

As one expects from the brand, the Tascam looks quite serious:

The display is bland in black and white but does the job. Here is a bottom shot:

While there is a micro-USB jack on this unit, it is only for charging and moving files back and forth. It does not allow streaming of audio which made my testing quite difficult. The only thing I could do is feeding it a 1 kHz tone, record it, pull it back onto the PC for analysis. In order to create a familiar data to other devices tested, I played the resulting file using Audio Precision analyzer's DAC and analyzed that. This adds an extra DAC and ADC to the path but I suspect both are much cleaner than this device so impact is minimal.

Recording Audio Measurements
Per above, I recorded a few minutes of a 1 kHz tone in uncompressed 24-bit/96 kHz and then played that file on the analyzer:

Distortion spikes are near -100 dB which together with some noise bring SINAD down to 91 dB. Here is how it ranks compared to other interfaces:

Performance is far superior to Zoom F6 that I just reviewed.

Conclusions
In absolute ranking, the performance of the DR-100 is not that great but compared to the last portable recorder we tested, is a breath of fresh air. Distortion and noise are very much under control. Wish it had USB capture so it could be used as an audio interface as well.

Overall, I am inclined to recommend the Tascam DR-100 MKiii.

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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

My wife has been busy all day canning tomatoes so I had to go out, burn gas, and buy food for dinner. As a result, I feel poor again. Please help me out of this mood by donating what you can using : https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/

 

[Patrick1958]

The DR-100 MKiii has a coax in and a line out, could you have used those for measurements? Just asking

 

[amirm]

The DR-100 MKiii has a coax in and a line out, could you have used those for measurements? Just asking

I only see input. Where is the output?

 

[amirm]

Here is the DR-100 playing back its own recording:

Pretty close to my Analyzer doing that.

 

[Patrick1958]

on the left side next to the usb connection, 3.5 mm line out.

 

[amirm]

on the left side next to the usb connection, 3.5 mm line out.

That's analog, not digital. I used it for above measurement just now.

 

[cistercian]

Thanks for the review! Interesting...not too bad for a field device.

 

[restorer-john]

It does not allow streaming of audio which made my testing quite difficult.

That is indeed a pity they haven't provided USB streaming. Even their DR-05x has USB streaming.

 

[jerryfreak]

the DR-05x is about 3 years newer than the DR100mkiii (and many more years newer than the original DR100 it is built upon), and is basically a different target market

the explosion of podcasting in last few years has resulted in a lot more USB connectivity built-in to products

 

[JohnYang1997]

I had the dr100 mkii. It was pretty good.

 

[Tks]

Just for those wondering and hoping the performance might've been better. The device isn't made for such (though should be I feel for the price). It uses and AK4558, which is unfortunately quite old (around half a decade), but, the measured performance is at the very least the best it could do pretty much anyway according to the specsheet of the chip itself. So it fulfilles it's advertised specs basically, so no problem aside from just wondering why they might've not used a newer chip seeing as how their implementation is fine. But obviously many people I think more importantly wish it had USB capture :\

Overall I think it's pretty nice for what it is (good set of I/O) but for the modern day, you can't help but feel they left so much on the table that they probably didn't need to. Actually, the device I was thinking of was the other, newer one, this one isn't new, and is period appropriate. With that said, the device is better knowing it wasn't actually a new device.

 

[milosz]

Wondering how the mics are. S/N, frequency response, distortion..... I know you're not set up to test microphones, although if you used a speaker of known characteristics you could measure using test sounds through the speaker and subtract the speaker's measured response, THD, etc... and you could probably get a S/N ratio too.

You'd get SOME idea of the mics.

 

[amirm]

Wondering how the mics are. S/N, frequency response, distortion..... I know you're not set up to test microphones, although if you used a speaker of known characteristics you could measure using test sounds through the speaker and subtract the speaker's measured response, THD, etc... and you could probably get a S/N ratio too.

You'd get SOME idea of the mics.

For anything remotely like that to happen I would need a great body massage, fantastic meal, and $1000 in my pocket. Even then, I may be reluctant!

 

[milosz]

For anything remotely like that to happen I would need a great body massage, fantastic meal, and $1000 in my pocket. Even then, I may be reluctant!

HAHA I've got your $1000, I am a chef, but also a pro weightlifter so if I gave you a massage it would end up crushing you.

 

[Doodski]

HAHA I've got your $1000, I am a chef, but also a pro weightlifter so if I gave you a massage it would end up crushing you.

Hehehe. "Who are you?", "I'm just the cook." (Steven Siegal in Under Siege)

 

[RayDunzl]

Wondering how the mics are. S/N, frequency response, distortion...

If it's anything like my DR07MkII, it's kinda ugly.

I think I looked at frequency response vs UMIK-1 with pink noise from the speakers.

---

Having found some old files, maybe not so bad at all:

The Tascam recording my speakers. I'm assuming it was a frequency sweep, the LF dip is the room.

This is 8 years ago.

The waves in the high frequency looks like the mic was a little off the centerline of the speakers.

A little roll off on the low end.

A recording of speakers: https://www.dropbox.com/s/v5jlzfzzfc4zstu/ThreeClips.wav?dl=0

Speakers via UMIK-1 without EQ three years ago.

Speakers via UMIK-1 with flat as a pancake EQ three years ago:

 

[Robin L]

Wondering how the mics are. S/N, frequency response, distortion..... I know you're not set up to test microphones, although if you used a speaker of known characteristics you could measure using test sounds through the speaker and subtract the speaker's measured response, THD, etc... and you could probably get a S/N ratio too.

You'd get SOME idea of the mics.

They're not very good. I've got two Tascam handheld recorders, from some time back. Cheap electrets, colored, best to use an outboard mike preamp and microphones.

 

[restorer-john]

They're not very good. I've got two Tascam handheld recorders, from some time back. Cheap electrets, colored, best to use an outboard mike preamp and microphones.

Or a calibration (correction) file...

 

[staticV3]

What would be the best program to analyze a pre-recorded file like amirm did here?

 

[Willem]

After the Zoom fiasco this is somewhat reassuring. Since in that thread someone asked about a use case for such devices, let me give an example.
My wife likes to make video recordings for various events. We decided the gear had to be as light and compact as possible so we bought a Panasonic M4/3 camera with the quiet 14-140 mm lens and a Gitzo carbon travel tripod. It does not get any lighter, or better at that weight. We quickly discovered that the camera's inbuilt audio was not good enough so we bought an Olympus ls-5 digital recorder, the lightest we could find at the time. This improved the audio quite a lot. But these tests now have me a bit worried: would the Olympus show similar weaknesses? The other thing we are pondering is an external microphone. The Sennheiser MK600 seems to beat the competition hands down but it makes the outfit heavier and more complex. But as with stereo systems where it is the speakers that are decisive for sound quality, here it may well be the microphone.