Review of TASCAM’s New HS-P82 8-Track Field Recorder
by Michael Paul, LSC Technical Director

When I first started at LSC some 13 years ago, it was a common sight in our Shipping and Receiving Department to see boxes with the familiar TASCAM logo coming and going on a seemingly daily basis. DA88 recorders sitting in stacks on the floor would appear and disappear as if only making a brief stop to rest on their road to their final destination. Soon, these gave way to DA98s and 78s, MMRs and DA-P1s and then, well, it just seemed to trail off to the point that it was rare to see anything from them back there. In the early 2000s, it looked like the transition to non-linear recording was passing TASCAM by. New recorders from other manufacturers were coming into the market, but none from TASCAM.

TASCAM had never really waded deep into the waters of portable (and time code-equipped) recorders. As they were losing their grip on the Post Production market, rather than make a push back into our little slice of the “Pro Audio” spectrum, they seemed content to focus on the MI and Studio Recording segments. They did release the HD-P2 recorder a few years ago, and while the HD-P2 remains a capable machine, support for it was seen as lacking because it was not designed “in-house” by TASCAM. Its woeful time code accuracy made it somewhat inconvenient to use unless an external (and stable) time code source was attached.

I had almost written them off to be honest. At trade shows, items that I thought might be useful to us (like the X-48) always gave me the impression of “close, but no cigar.” Eventually, where TASCAM was once a “must-see” stop on my trade show itinerary, they were now relegated to the “well, if I have time, I’ll stop by” category. Over the last few years, I admit, I never had that spare time—until last year when they announced the forthcoming HS-P82 portable recorder.

In fact, it seems that TASCAM has been very busy indeed, announcing more than a dozen new products over the last months that are aimed squarely at either the Production, Post-Production, and Broadcast markets. The first of these to be released is the aforementioned HS-P82, so let's take a look at what it has to offer.

When the first prototype was brought to me last year, it was, to be polite, buggy. Freezes, reboots and error messages abounded with that beta version but when the final shipping product landed on my desk a few weeks ago, most of those little indiscretions seemed to have been exorcised from the HS-P82's firmware. In its place was a solidly built and confidently operating unit that contained many of the features we've come to expect in a professional recorder (and only a few drawbacks).

First, the stats.

The HS-P82 will record:

• 4 tracks at up to 192 kHz
• 8 tracks at up to 96 kHz
• 10 tracks at up to 48 kHz

The HS-P82 has eight Mic/Line inputs on full-size XLR connectors. Each of these inputs feature:

• Mic/Line switching right on the panel (a third switch position configures the input for Mic level, but with a -25dB pad)
• +48V Phantom (sorry, no T)
• Low Cut filter at 40Hz/80Hz/120Hz and either -12dB or -18dB per octave slope,
• Phase Reverse
• Peak Limiter (32:1 Ratio/ -5dB Threshold / 3ms Attack & 300ms release).

Next to the inputs are two XLR outputs for the +4dB Line level Output of the internal Stereo buss.

The back side of the unit has an opening for an NP-1 style battery, and next to that is a space to mount an adapter plate for an IDX V-mount battery, much like on the Fostex PD606. The V-mount adapter is included with the unit, as is the coaxial power supply and an NP tray for loading AA batteries into the rear slot. TASCAM claims a run-time of approx 5 hrs on a Lithium NP-1 (IDX NP-L7) battery, and about 2 hrs on AAs. One of the neat things about the HS-P82 is that it allows for triple redundancy of the power source. You can connect the AC power supply to the coaxial input, another DC supply to the 4-pin, and pop an NP-1 in the back slot. The HS-P82 has a very flexible power management menu and will monitor all three sources at once, assigning priority to the Coax, then the 4-pin, and then the battery. In the event your first two power sources fail, you still have the internal battery backup to keep the unit running.

Two Compact Flash card slots are covered by a rubber protector. The HS-P82 accepts Type I Compact Flash cards only, and UDMA support is recommended. Inserting a non-UDMA enabled CFC into the slot will bring up a warning that indicates the HS-P82’s displeasure at your selection. Non-UDMA cards will work, but TASCAM’s belief is that:

• Non-UDMA enabled cards generally do not meet the speed requirements necessary to play back 8 tracks of 24-Bit/96K audio and utilize the FF/REW keys, and the future implementation of Mirroring (not enabled in V1.00) will require the faster cards for trouble-free use

• Going forward, most manufacturers of Compact Flash will probably only ship UDMA enabled cards anyway

The front panel features eight pop-up analog potentiometers to control gain for the eight inputs, a headphone jack with volume control, a slate/tone activation button, basic transport controls and a swiveling front panel that showcases the HS-P82's TFT touch-panel display as well as hard buttons to access the menus and home screen. A single, large data knob on the display acts as a multi-function device to give a physical interface to many of the menu driven items within.

Time code accuracy, which was the bugaboo of the HD-P2, is drastically improved. TASCAM’s engineers state that the clock is accurate to 0.02ppm. My semi-scientific bench tests seem to confirm their claim, and show the HS-P82 dropping maybe a half frame over 8 hours when referenced to an Ambient ACC501 Master Clock. Not the best, but certainly in the realm of “pro”. Word Clock output is rock solid too.

That's the basics.

Now, when you get right down to it, there's no getting around the fact that the HS-P82 is a little on the large size, roughly the same height and width of a Fostex PD6, but about an inch or so deeper. Not overly cumbersome, but just enough that you might think twice about throwing one over your shoulder and heading off into the wild. Weight is also a bit of an issue. Even without a battery inserted, the HS-P82 clocks in at 9.5 lbs (compared to a 788T at 3.75 lbs or a Cantar at 8 lbs). Personally, I think it will spend most of its time on a cart, but what do I know? A Nagra IV-STC with batteries and a reel of tape weighs 18 lbs, and that didn’t stop people from carrying it around. Maybe we’ve just become soft?

The main reason for the weight would seem to be TASCAM's use of all-metal construction for the housing, and the insistence of full-size connectors wherever possible. Indeed, the build quality of the HS-P82 is really quite good. Everything feels fairly substantial, from the burly strap-rings to the brushed aluminum housing, and even to the solid way that the display clicks into position when you adjust it. It's kind of like the feeling you get when you close the door on a BMW. Even the gain knobs feel pretty good.

But how does it sound? That's the question I get most often, and the one that is the most difficult to answer. Quantifying the quality of a mic pre-amp is a bit like asking a group of people to name their favorite film. Everyone's choice will be different, as will be their reason for choosing it. If there were an explicit, universally agreed upon criteria for choosing your favorite film, then we would all choose the same one.

Anyway, I tend to lump my appraisal of mic preamp quality into three highly subjective categories:

• Lame - these preamps are noisy, easily distorted, and are generally unfit for human consumption. They should be avoided at all cost. You know what I'm talking about, right?

• Perfectly Acceptable - these preamps have respectable noise floors, a useable gain range, and while they may color the sound a certain way due to their particular design or component makeup, they are perfectly acceptable for daily use. Some may be quieter than others, some may be more harmonically pleasing, but no one is ever going to call you up and suggest that you ran your microphones through a Speak-n-Spell on their production.

• Sonosax – Once you go “Sax” you’ll never go back.

With that in mind, I would put the TASCAM "sound" squarely in the second category. They are quiet, they have good gain (In fact maybe a smidge too much! With the gain all the way down, and an MKH50 attached, you still get a pretty good level.), and there are no annoying artifacts. With nothing connected, turn the gain up to about ¾ of maximum and you’ll start to hear the noise floor. However, in all the tests I’ve done with various mics, the gain structure of the HS-P82’s inputs is such that your gain settings would probably be much lower anyway, and applying that much gain would put you into overage almost constantly.

For what it’s worth, a long-time (and highly experienced) customer of mine just wandered into my office and gave it a listen. His response was, "Wow, it sounds good... even better than my (recorder name redacted)!" So there. That's about as objective as it gets.
I will now embark on a lengthy description of the preamps using such phrases as "Shimmering Highs" and "Thundering Lows" (feel free to skip to the next section).

Still here? Ok, let's talk about that touch-screen!

Once you've connected all of your gear to the HS-P82, just about everything else shy of Input trim and Transport control is handled by the touch-screen. There is a "Home" button on the display that will bring you back to the home screen from wherever you are within the menus. The home screen shows metering for all ten tracks, displays time code or time elapsed/remaining, TC and Sync status, file names, Media status, Battery “health”, etc. There are little tabs on the bottom row to access other common menus. It all adds up to, what is to me, a slightly crowded little window. I would like to see some user-selectable option in the future to let you decide what is on the home screen, but maybe that's just my own feeling.

Most of the display sections I noted above are actually hot-keys. Touch the file name and the menu to adjust the next Scene and Take number pops up (I should note that the HS-P82's file naming structure conforms to the SCENE_TAKE.WAV ideology). An odd thing about the HS-P82's file name structure is that it includes both a "-" and a "T" data separator between the Scene and Take fields. A little redundant, but that's ok.

Another physical button brings up the Menus (labeled the "Menu" button, of course), and there you will find tabs for Input selection, Media management, Record Settings, Mixer, Sync etc. Spend about five minutes with the HS-P82 and you will find that it's fairly easy to navigate to what you want to adjust. Everything is where it should be, and some menus can be accessed from multiple screens in different ways, so backing out of one menu to get to another is kept to a minimum.

The "Project" button calls up the Project screen, where settings for navigating to and/or creating projects can be found (more on this later). I don't want to get into a menu-by-menu description of what is in the HS-P82 menus, but let me state that just about everything you would want is in there. If a manufacturer had come to me and said, "We want to build a portable recorder for your market", I would have given them a laundry list of little things that need to be in there. Pull-up and Pull-down? It's in there. Fake (F-Mode) time stamps? It's in there. Metadata? Sure. False Start? Circle Take? Tri-Level Sync? Yes, yes, and yes.

TASCAM seems to have done their homework, and I admit to being a little disappointed that I didn't get to tell them, "A-HA!!! You forgot that one!!!", when I met with their designers and product support group a few weeks ago.

The meters themselves are very fluid and easy to see. You can make adjustments to them (peak hold, release, overage warning) in the Meter Setup menu.

Anything requiring the entering of text brings up a virtual QWERTY keyboard. If you’ve ever used an iPhone, you’ll get the idea. Typing in data on it is fairly accurate (I only “fat-fingered” the wrong letter once or twice), but I would like to see the backspace button, which is small and crammed into the upper right-hand side) made a little larger. When you go to enter a new Scene number, the HS-P82 brings up your current scene to edit, but always wants to add an extra “001” to the field. To get rid of this, you need to backspace and well, you get the picture.

How are they in direct sunlight? Not bad. Not great, but readable. Being able to adjust the angle of the display seems to help in that regard. You can also adjust the brightness to fit your environment.

Take a few minutes. Download the manual, and you'll know everything you need to know pretty quickly about what menus contain what features. Speaking of the manual, let me just say that TASCAM did a pretty good job on the manual. It’s logical, easy to understand, and it even has a list of Error Codes and an Index. Bless you TASCAM.

This brings me to the Data Knob, and by extension, my two big “issues”.

The basic layout of the HS-P82 allows for the recording of eight tracks, which can then be mixed down internally to two more tracks (the “2Mix” file, incidentally, is always recorded as a separate file from the “ISO” tracks and is always polyphonic). To adjust the level of an ISO track to the stereo buss, or adjust the pan, you must press the “PAN/LVL” button on the touch screen, touch the virtual Level or Pan knob on the screen, and then use the Data Knob to adjust that parameter.

What this all boils down to is that you can only adjust one of these parameters at a time, meaning you cannot perform a dynamic mix of all tracks in real time. So if you are using the HS-P82 on its own, and you want to mix eight tracks to the stereo buss, you’d better have some fast fingers. Related to this is the lack of any ability in the HS-P82 to access the mix tracks from an external source (either Analog or Digital) so if you were thinking of using an external mixer to send ISOs and a Mix, think again.

In all fairness to TASCAM, when I pointed this out to them, they seemed to understand and promised to look for a way to change this. There was some talk from them of an external control interface that would solve this issue (and others), but the ability to do this without external hardware is important. Oh, and if you are thinking “can I just use the Input Trims as Mix Faders?”—you can’t.

The other issue, the one I spent the most time talking to TASCAM about (and undoubtedly the most boring), was their implementation of the directory structure on the HS-P82’s CF media.

The HS-P82 organizes files in a hierarchical folder structure consisting of a Project Folder and then sub-folders for every Scene recorded within that Project, with the actual audio WAV files contained within each Scene Folder. What this results in is multiple sub-folders within the Project Folder, and your audio files spread out and segregated into folder after folder.

If you want to transfer files from the CF to a computer, and you want all of the files to be in a single sub-folder (so they will play on a Fostex machine in Telecine), you have to open one folder at a time and transfer the contents. My suggestion to TASCAM was to simplify the folder structure so that all WAV files recorded on a particular day reside in the same folder. This will make batch processing or copying much simpler. If your current workflow requires the delivery of optical media at the end of the day, then the HS-P82’s folder structure is going to make that process very tedious, and since the HS-P82 does not have the ability to interface with external DVD burners, you are going to spend a lot of time in front of your laptop arranging files and burning discs with a visibly irritated Teamster looking over your shoulder.

Of course, you might interject, “…but why should they care about compatibility with the DV40 when TASCAM is about to release the HS-8 which will solve all of our problems?”

Well…not so fast there, pal. The success or failure of the HS-8 (whose internal architecture is entirely based on the HS-P82) will depend on its ability to easily handle media from any portable recorder that can deliver on CF. Currently, the HS-8 requires that files be in its native directory structure in order to play them, and since only the HS-P82 can deliver that structure, it will have limited appeal in Post, and so we’re back to square one. TASCAM has stated that their intent for the HS-8 is to be compatible with all other recorders, so we’ll see how the directory structure issue plays out when that machine is released.

Other than the above, most of my issues with the HS-P82 are small change, and most could probably be solved in future firmware releases, such as:

• Pressing the Pause button puts the recorder into “Record Pause”. Subsequently pressing the Record Button puts it into record, but if you press the Play button while in Ready Record, it goes into record as well. I can see this causing accidental recordings.
  
  
• There is no Remote Roll capability. TASCAM proposed re-tasking the PS-2 port to accept a simple contact closure, so we’ll see.
  
  
• Variable routing of Inputs to tracks is not supported. You cannot route, say, Input 2 to track 6. It’s a one-to one relationship between the Inputs and Tracks. This may change.
  
  
• The Slate button on the front panel activates the Slate Mic or Tone, but only one at a time. You must change the assignment in a submenu, so if you want to do a “Voice Announce” followed by 20 seconds of tone, you’ll have to go into the Setup menu to change it while recording. Also, there is a short delay in the activation of the Slate/Tone button to prevent accidental activation. The delay is just enough to make a quick “two-pop” tone at the end of your recording rather difficult.
  
  
• The time code output follows the transport. When you are in Standby or Record, the internal generator code is output. If you go into Play, the TC of the playback file is output. It would be nice to designate that the internal generator always outputs code.
  
  
• Limited outputs
  
  
• There is no provision to attach external media and record to it.

All-in-all (and even with its initial shortcomings), I think TASCAM has done a very good job at building a machine that meets the needs of Production Sound. As noted above, if your current workflow requires optical media, then the HS-P82 might not be the right choice for you as your primary machine (it would, of course, make an excellent backup machine in that scenario). If the forthcoming HS-8 can make serious inroads into Post, then that concern is moot, and for those whose work does not require the above caveat, then I would have no problem recommending the HS-P82 for field work.

Welcome back, TASCAM. I will stop by your booth at NAB.

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North Hollywood, CA 91602
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