GEAR GROUP TEST
The Olympus LS-P2 comes from Olympus’s range of voice recorders – mostly intended to dictate letters and so on – so it doesn’t sport much in the way of external inputs. There’s just a 3.5mm jack for an external mic, so no XLRs or 1/4in jacks. It is very tiny, and will easily fit in a shirt pocket. Bizarrely, for something that looks like a dictaphone, Olympus has fitted the LS-P2 with a unique microphone system. On the top of the unit is a pair of directional mics forming a non-coincident stereo pair. That, in itself, seems a little over-the-top OLYMPUS LS-P2 £154 www.olympus.co.uk
SPECIFICATIONS Built-inmicrophone: Stereo omnidirectional combinedwith mono omnidirectional Inputs: 3.5mmmini-jack Number of record tracks: 2 Recordingmedium: 8GB internal, MicroSD Card Maximumsample rate/word size: Up to 96kHz/24-bit Power: Rechargeable AAA battery Features: 5/10 No mic preamps – or much in the way of inputs at all Performance: 8/10 Surprisingly good quality for its size, but not outstanding Handling: 9/10 The unit’s tiny size and surprisingly good controls make it a go-anywhere piece of kit Value for money: 6/10 The Olympus LS-P2 costs a lot given its limitations PROMOVIEMAKER RATING: 7/10 Pros: Size Cons: No professional mic inputs HOW IT RATES
for a dictaphone, but they have also added a third, omni, mic. It’s easier tomake an omni with extended bass response, so with a clever crossover Olympus has made a pocket recorder able to record stereo across the full audio range, from20Hz to 20kHz. By varying the mix of the stereo pair and the omni, they can even adjust the width of the stereo capture. The front has a small LCD for the user interface – there are a couple of diminutive function keys and a menu button beneath the display –with transport controls, file management controls and a four-way rocker. The sides house that 3.5mmmic jack, a 3.5mmheadphone jack and the power/hold switch. The unit runs on a single, rechargeable AAA NiMH battery, though you could, of course, pop in an alkaline battery if you run out of juice in the field. The LS-P2 has 8GB of internal audio storage, and there’s a MicroSD card slot as well. Sliding a lever on the side of the unit pushes out a USB connector from the bottom, so you can plug the whole thing into a computer to download your recordings whilst charging the battery. The simple menu system is surprisingly feature-rich. There is a limiter of sorts, with a couple of pre-sets for music and speech, you can record PCM or MP3, and there’s a low cut filter with just a single setting. I really liked the fact that you can turn off the record LED, so it would be possible to stash the LS-P2 on-set and not give the game away with an orange flashing light. The audio quality is amazing for such a tiny thing. Noise is well controlled at sensible gains, the mics seem reasonably sensitive, and the stereo image is good. I used it to record some traffic noise as
ambience for a documentary, and the result was perfectly usable, with that extended bass really capturing the rumble of diesel trucks passing by. The Olympus LS-P2 isn’t a flexible field recorder, like the other units on test here, but is surprisingly adept at what it does.
THE VERDICT
It’s hard to pick between the Zoom and the TASCAM. If the latter had four channel recording then it would be a clear winner, with better audio quality and more dedicated controls, but the Zoom has some great features and is very competitively priced. Ultimately, I have to ask what I would buy. Without doubt, if budget allowed, I would get both the MixPre-6 and the Olympus LS-P2. The former because it’s a proper location sound recorder, and the latter because of its size. I would keep it in a pocket and carry it everywhere, as the best location sound recorder is always the one you have with you.
The MixPre-6 draws on Sound Devices’ expertise in location recorders, making it the most flexible, professionally focused unit in the group. For a small documentary set-up it could easily be used as the main mixer/recorder in the sound bag, lacking only an internal timecode generator. At the other end of the scale is the Shure VP83F. A recording engineer friend of mine once said that it’s not the microphone you have, but where you put it that counts, and the quality of on-camera sound – even from a very capable shotgun mic – is never going to be as good as that captured by a lavalier or boom close miccing the subject.
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PRO MOVIEMAKER SPRING 2018
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