Recording - March 2012 - 20

B Y M I K E M E T L AY

The BR recorders from Roland’s BOSS brand are known for hitting a sweet spot for the beginner and hurried songwriter/composer—they have a lot of good features, but are laid out so simply that practically anyone can sit down with one and start banging out good recordings, usually without even opening the manual. BOSS has followed on the success of the pocket-sized MICRO BR with the MICRO BR BR-80 (I’ll shorten that to “BR-80” for this review), which represents an impressive evolution of the ultra-small digital recorder.

BOSS

MICRO BR BR-80 Digital Recorder
The box The BR-80 is compact (easily fitting in a guitar case) and sturdy. Its controls are delightfully gig-bag-friendly, with thumbwheels and a recessed encoder dial rather than exposed pots to snap off. Said encoder dial is surrounded by four cursor buttons, and aside from the five transport buttons and a few function/menu selectors, that’s it for the top panel of the BR-80. The rest of the real estate is for a bright backlit display and a pair of onboard mics for field recording of acoustic instruments. The front-panel Power button also cycles between the unit’s three modes— MTR, eBand, and Live Rec. The side panels of the BR-80 follow the guitar-pedalboard tradition of “inputs on the right, outputs on the left”. The right panel has a 1/4" TS Guitar/Mic In with Rec Level thumbwheel and a 1/8" TRS Line In; the left panel has a 1/8" TRS Phones/Line Out jack with a Volume thumbwheel. The right panel also has jacks for a Mini-B USB cable (included) and a BOSS power supply (not included). Flip the unit over to see the access panels for the SD/SDHC card (a 2 GB card is provided, and the BR-80 can handle up

An elegant purpose-built tool for the recording songwriter
to 32 GB cards) and two AA batteries, as well as the Guitar/Mic input impedance switch. Getting to work MTR mode offers a complete recording/mixdown solution for creating complete songs from audio you provide. In this mode, the BR-80 can record up to two tracks at once, play back up to eight tracks of audio plus a built-in stereo Rhythm track, and offers tools for mixing and editing your data and creating finished tracks for export. When you set up the BR-80 to record, up to three separate input sources are live at once and are mixed in the digital domain before being sent to the Track or Tracks you’ve record-armed. The primary input is either the stereo onboard mics or the mono Guitar/Mic In, which accepts either a Hi-Z signal from a guitar or bass or a Low-Z dynamic mic input (there’s no phantom power). Plugging into the jack switches off the onboard mics. This first signal is processed by the insert effects processor and then recorded; the Rec Level thumbwheel adjusts its volume, which is also controlled by a menu-accessible Input Sensitivity (preamp gain) setting. In addition to that signal, the stereo Line In is always live and taking in signals at unity gain, even when the Rec Level thumbwheel is all the way down, and you can also route audio from a computer into the BR-80 via its USB connection and record that as well. It’s a little bit fiddly to get around the many menus for the built-in mixer, but that’s mainly because there are so many functions on offer. You can set levels, panning, mute, solo, and adjust eq and the reverb send. By the way, the latter effects deserve a special shout out—they are very musical and flexible, adding a lot to the BR-80’s professional-sounding results. The 3-band eq on each channel has a fully parametric mid plus semi-parametric high and low, letting you do some nice tone shaping and even notch out problem frequencies with accuracy. The global send/return reverb has three algorithms—room, hall, and plate—and up to 10 seconds of reverb time, very smooth and lush; it’s great for gluing a mix together in a common soundspace.

RECORDING MARCH 2012

Recording - March 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - March 2012