Ok, so in the spirit of full disclosure, our friends at Sanyo’s PR firm sent me a Sanyo Xacti to review.  And, since you all know that I have endorsed stuff (see my AlterEGO and GK posts), and you all know that I have a sense of humor, I hope that I can find a way to balance my review with at least something self-deprecating, maybe even sarcastic.

I have been struck by the importance of balancing my performing/teaching career with the business of music in the 21st century.  It’s not easy to focus on being an artist…no wait, a teacher…no wait, a businessman…no wait, a person.  There are many, many ways in which those things combine to create a less schizophrenic Rick, but sometimes those things are disparate entities.  As an art-driven person, it has always been easy for me to live in a musical fantasy world, stepping outside of it long enough to articulate aspects of that world to colleagues and students.  But harder has been the quantification of that realm, translated into a business-model.

In the 1980s, the trick was to find a way to document your work somehow, and it took a lot of expense and time to get that done.  In the 1990s, things became less expensive to document, but relating it to the rest of the world was still tricky, depending upon how you feel about the intersection of music, technology and business (remember the old Napster?).  Now, it’s super easy and fairly inexpensive to document your work, but getting the new, global, digital audience to pay any attention whatsoever is still hard.

The tool in the 1990s that most musicians I know used was a minidisc (MD) recorder.  This was a relatively inexpensive, decent sounding recording device which enabled the capture of an artist’s music for later dissemination.  The “capture” was easy, but the “dissemination” was very hard.  Convert to cassette, or burn a CD?  If you can imagine, there was actually a time when the MD recorders (one major manufacturer comes to mind) would not allow a musician to record his/her own concert on the MD, transfer the file to the computer, and then burn a CD of it.  Sure, you could record all you wanted to, and you could even upload your files to the computer.  But no burning.  I understand why that decision was made, but it rendered the entire MD experience useless because the practical application of the product vanished the moment you tried to use it for anything but archiving.

I have a real chip on my shoulder about that because it meant that the only reasonable tool was a disaster of sound recording.  Remember this:

Most of my friends, way back when, actually used this to record concerts and rehearsals, and then to make cassette demos.  Cumbersome!  Time consuming!  Uh, not very fantastic sound!

Ok, well lots of time has passed, and the RIAA and Napster have come to some kind of agreement which has meant that consumer recording devices are actually made in a way that is reasonable for musicians.  I have a Roland Edirol, which I love, but there are some issues with it – it’s very big, and lately I have been having problems with setting peak levels, so I get lots of distortion.

When Sanyo’s people asked me about reviewing their Xacti, I sent this back to them:

I have been using the Sanyo Xacti for the past month in a wide variety of situations, from concert performances and rehearsals, to teaching classes and private lessons.  For about 10 years, I have been searching for a reasonable replacement for my minidisc recorder, which I used religiously, but I couldn’t find anything that met my expectations for 21st century/digital convenience, plus sound quality.  The Xacti fills this gap nicely, adding things like portability – it is tiny – and on-board editing tools to the equation.  Connecting to the computer to recharge the battery seems strange at first, but this combined with the easy back-up of files makes this very, very reasonable.  An excellent companion for gigging/teaching musicians.

So, I like it.  I’m using it.  It’s a good thing.  Really.

Wait a minute – that wasn’t funny at all!  Well, here’s a link to Krusty the Clown’s product endorsement agreement, and list of endorsements.

Best, R.