In this episode we'll take a look at the DEITY PR-4, which is probably the most anticipated audio recorder for video in 2026. Let's jump in and take a look. Number one, let me just be clear, DEITY sent this to me free of charge. The recorder itself, the battery, the cage, the sound bag, and the charger. So that's full disclosure there. They've not told me what to say. They haven't reviewed this video prior to posting, so all the opinions I share here are my own. And also this video is sponsored by Learn Light and Sound, which is where I have my online courses teaching you how to make better sound and lighting for your videos. Link down below.  

Okay, first let's jump straight in to the features and what I consider like the really strong points on this particular recorder. Number one, the XLR TRS inputs are combination inputs, first of all. That's not true of some of the competitors like the MixPre 3 and the Zoom F3. The max input level when you have the inputs set to microphone levels plus 11 dBu, and if you have it set to line levels plus 24 dBu. So that's actually more headroom than you get on, for example, the Zoom F3. Not quite as much as the MixPre, but pretty close. Let's go ahead and demonstrate here with a clipping test, just to demonstrate the 32-bit float recording capabilities and the ability to recover that in post-production. (Silence)  

All right, this will be a clip test. I'm going to get up a little bit closer to the microphone and talk pretty loud here to see what this sounds like and how readily we can recover this with 32-bit float. So this is our test for 32-bit float and clipping the front end. The inputs also support AES3 and AES42 digital inputs. So if you have a digital microphone of some sort and you want to get that in here, you can do that. That's pretty cool. And you can also stereo link the two XLR inputs, just a standard stereo linking or mid-side linking as well.  

As far as self-noise, if you set the input gain on the recorder to 0 dB and I plug in a dummy XLR connector with a 150 ohm resistor across pins two and three, which essentially simulates a dynamic microphone without getting input from a microphone, the sound that it's capturing. This is just kind of a way to get just the self-noise measurement from the preamplifiers. Make a recording with that dummy XLR connector plugged in, bring it into post-production, and our RMS Max sits at 128 dB full scale. So that's really clean. In other words, if you're recording dialogue, nobody's going to hear that. But you might say, "Curtis, but I am going to apply some gain. I have to apply some gain because if I don't, then it's not going to be loud enough." Yes, you're right. Fair point. Worst case scenario, if I have to boost gain 60 dB, the noise floor is then sitting at 68 dB. So even with the most gain hungry dynamic microphones, you'll still be able to make clean recordings with this. In other words, self-noise of the preamplifiers, that performance is good. It's not a concern from my point of view. There's also a 3.5 millimeter stereo unbalanced input, so you could plug in, for example, a 3.5 millimeter lavalier microphone and record that. The input does supply 5 volts of plug-in power, and it also supports AES-3 and AES-42 inputs. So if you have a digital microphone with a 3.5 millimeter output, that also will work here.  

Now powering the PR-4, this is actually one of probably the best recorders I've seen in this price range as far as powering options. Number one, the native battery slot is for an NPF 550 battery, and DEITY supplies... you can buy one of those batteries from DEITY. It's a 3320 mAh battery. It was able to power two phantom-powered microphones, a Sennheiser MKH 50 and a Sennheiser MKH 8050 into the two inputs, with recording on for seven hours and 37 minutes on that battery. So that's good. That's a good power. That's a long power time. In addition to that, there is a USB-C port, which can take power delivery to power the unit, and there's a four-pin Herosie input. So if you're using this in a bag and you have a power distribution system to also power your wireless microphone receivers or anything else in your bag, this can also use that, which is beautiful. That's probably the best power implementation I've seen. And, you know, power efficiency, power input options, really good. In addition to those two external power sources, the USB-C power delivery and the Herosie, both of those can actually charge the internal battery as well. So they've done a really nice job as far as power is concerned here.  

Recording formats all the... well, for the most part, the normal suspects here can record 32-bit float, it can record 32-bit linear, and it can record 24-bit linear. And as far as the sample rates, 48 kilohertz, 96 kilohertz, and 192 kilohertz. So it does not, interestingly, support 44.1, which is not an issue for most of those doing video anyway. Not normally the format you need. Recording media. It can record to standard-size SD cards, and also it has an internal SSD, 64 gigabytes. So you do have redundancy in recording. It can record to both of them at the same time, and it seems to do a nice job there. Time code. I'm kind of rushing because there's a ton on this, and we can dive into more details if you have specific questions, but next let's move on to time code. Best implementation I've seen in a sub-500 recorder to date. It has basically the equivalent of a DEITY TC1 time code generator built into the PR-4. So I think the most common likely to get is, "Do I need to get a TC1 time code generator to hook up to the recorder and leave it connected during a shoot?" No, you don't. It has one built in, so you're good there. What this means is that you can wirelessly jam to other DEITY TC1s, the DEITY Slate, the DEITY Theos wireless microphone system, and the DEITY PR2 using the Citus Audio app, or wired if you wanted to do it. And in some of you can actually jam them wirelessly without the app as well. So it's all integrated into the DEITY time code system. You can also jam to any other SIMT-enabled time code generator via wire. So there is a time code I.O. port, a 3.5 millimeter time code I.O. port, and you can configure that port to either mic level or to line level, depending on what your device needs. So you can jam to those products as well. And we didn't experience any sort of frame drift over seven hours and 37 minutes. That same period of time we were recording to our microphones, the time code did not drift at all. So we were at 20 degrees Celsius, so we're basically at standard room temperature for human dwellings, and we didn't get any sort of drift. If you're going to be in extreme circumstances, or super super cold, your mileage may vary a little bit there.  

Auto-mix. This is an example. Now I've had this recorder just for a few weeks now. There's a lot to test here. I have not tested everything extensively, so this is one that I've only started with. And let me just tell you what I know so far. It works. To my ear, it sounds more aggressive than the Zoom F-series Auto-mix or the Sound Devices Mix Assist, but it also left some artifacts if you are not set up optimally. And that's true of any auto-mix algorithm that can happen. But for example, when... Well, let me just... I need to come back to this another time. But when Emma and I are both sitting next to each other shoulder to shoulder, facing the same way, two boob microphones. I had an MKH50 above me. She had an 8050 above her, literally sitting shoulder to shoulder. It has trouble kind of switching back and forth between the two. And if you have no idea what I'm talking about, Auto-mix is usually an amazing feature. And I think this one's going to work really well if you're set up in a traditional podcast kind of format. So close miking with dynamic microphones, optimizing where people are sitting so they're not sitting shoulder to shoulder, maybe having facing each other instead. So you're using the directionality of the microphones to help manage things. And it just makes things so much easier. If you're doing a podcast on a regular basis with multiple people in the same space, mic bleed is a huge issue and it doesn't sound great. So when I talk, my mic picks up my sound, but also everyone else's mic picks up the sound of me, but at a delayed time so that it just sounds bad. It just sounds really bad. You get comb filtering and it's not good. Mix assist, or in this case, auto-mix really, really helps with that. It makes it much cleaner. All right, we'll come back to that.  

Noise reduction. There is a built-in noise reduction feature. You can dial in up to six decibels of noise reduction. Here's a sample. I am now going to do a noise reduction sample for our noise source. We have this little error filter here. Let's turn that on. You can hear that. We'll set that down there. And let's come into our noise reduction. Right now it's turned off. Where's that zero dB? Let's turn it up. One dB. That's six dB of noise reduction. And if I keep talking, I want to hear what it does to my voice as well. That's one of the tricks with noise reduction. That was my hands. Noise reduction, it has the potential, of course, to cut into the dialogue itself, and that can be quite problematic. So let's go ahead and turn it back off down to zero dB. That's zero dB. And here it is again at minus six dB. So it's subtle, but it doesn't seem to affect my voice a whole lot, which I appreciate. So there we go. Noise reduction on the PR-4. My assessment is, it's well implemented. It doesn't do a ton of noise reduction, but what it does, it does very much. And it does without creating a bunch of artifacts and trashing the dialogue. This is different than, for example, on things like the DJI Mic 2, or was it the two that included noise reduction? And it was awful. Yeah, it got rid of the noise, but it also trashed the dialogue.  

Moving on to the display. It is an M OLED display, 456 by 280 pixels. Good pixel density is pretty small screen. So for those with eyesight, that's not as great as it used to be. You probably will need your glasses. I certainly do. It does have some limited touch capability, and I think this is really well implemented. So it's not a touch screen for everything. You have the menu encoder for that, but it does allow you to do something. So for example, when I'm on the front screen or the main screen here, and I want to switch what these knobs do, whether they're controlling inputs one and two or inputs three and four, I just tap the screen, switches to the other inputs. That's really handy. You can also swipe to get to some quick menus. So that's kind of the limits of what the touchscreen can do, but it's too small to be effective otherwise anyway. So I think this is a really good choice in how they implemented it. So good job, DEITY, on that.  

The PR-4 can also be a USB audio interface. It does record or does stream via USB 32-bit float at 48 kilohertz. It's stereo only, so it's just sending a stereo mix from the PR-4 to your computer, and it doesn't get any output from the computer. So you can't listen back to the computer audio with your headphones, at least with a Mac. I don't know if this is different on a Windows machine, but on the Mac, that's how it's implemented, at least at the time of the review here. So I'd really kind of view this as more of a convenience feature than a full-blown audio interface. So if you're expecting to use this as a full-blown audio interface, I think you need to modify your expectations. Probably not the best device for that. The PR-4 can be controlled by the Citus Audio app. This is a pretty mature app at this point. It's been out for a number of years, and it enables you to wirelessly control from your phone pretty much every feature on the device itself. It's really nicely done, and it works well. This is weird, but on a 32-bit float recorder, it also has a limiter. And you might ask, "Why do I need a limiter if I have a 32-bit float recorder?" You don't necessarily. If you're just recording post-production and you can correct the cases where the audio goes above zero dB in post, then you probably don't need it. However, there are some cases where it is useful. For example, if you're wanting to save some time in post-production, or perhaps when you're sending audio to a camera, or perhaps you're doing some sort of live production, that's where a digital limiter like what they have here is useful. So here's a sample of what it sounds like. Okay, this is our test with the limiter. I am pushing the levels here. The gain is way too high, and I'll get a little bit closer to the microphone. This is our test with the limiter. Limiter is a pretty extreme setting. It's basically a brick wall limiter. It will prevent you from technically clipping. So let's hear what this sounds like. Now here's a maybe a little bit more sane example where I'm not clipping constantly, but instead kind of tickling up against the top. This might be a more realistic example if you do manage your levels a little bit better, what you might expect.  

Moving on to the build. The PR-4 is largely plastic, but it's a firm and fairly sturdy feeling plastic, so that's good. There is a spring-loaded battery slash SD card door, and yes the card is still accessible even without removing the battery. They're both behind the same door. There are two detented channel knobs, one detented menu or headphone volume knob. It's kind of a shared knob there. There are record menu and mark buttons, and these buttons are clicky so you can easily tell when you've engaged them. That's nice. There's a locking power switch on the top. It's easy to access, but not easy to accidentally turn off, which is really good. So far I like it. I think it's working really well. Best of all, in my opinion, there is an optional all-metal cage for $59 US. It is made for this specific recorder by DEITY, and that makes it a much tougher build overall, and it has both quarter inch and three-eighths inch taps all over the top and bottom. So that's pretty nice, pretty useful. As far as RF interference, it appears to be fairly well shielded. I did not get any sort of RF interference picked up from a mobile phone that was streaming via Wi-Fi or a UHF wireless transmitter held in close proximity to the recorder. No issues whatsoever, so it seems to be nicely shielded. The warranty is a two-year warranty, and the pricing here in the United States is $449 USD for the PR-4 recorder, $59 for the metal cage, $39 for the NPF550 battery, and $58 for something we haven't talked about, actually, and that is the charger here. It's a USB-C and USB-A gallium nitride power adapter. I've had one actually one of these for about a little over a year, I think, maybe longer than that even, and I've used it for powering lots of things. It's a really nice power delivery implementation on this, and it can supply up to 140 watts. Been fantastic. And then there is also this $79 custom bag for the PR-4 made by DEITY as well, and that's pretty nice if you want to keep a nice small kit that you need to be super mobile with. So that's all good.  

No product is perfect, including the PR-4. These are my subjective cons, criticisms. They're not deal breakers for me, but number one on the build, the knobs do wobble a little bit, so for me that's all the more reason for that metal cage to become a necessity. I like to protect my gear, so I find the metal cage makes it kind of makes up for that, but the knobs are not like the sturdiest in the world. Display. The size is a little bit small for my eyes, which are no longer as perfect as they used to be, no longer 2020. And some of the color choices are hard to read on the screen. So for example, when you're charging the unit, if you just have like the PD cable USB-C cable plugged in and the unit's off, you get a little battery symbol on the screen and a green level that shows how charged it is. And then overlaid on the green is a number that tells you what percentage the battery charge is at currently. And that text is white on a green battery background, and it's pretty difficult to read. That should be fixable in firmware, so that's some feedback for DEITY. There are a couple things like that where I found color contrast was not ideal, so it made it a little harder to read. Next up, the boot time. I have a 32 gigabyte card that I put in my PR-4 here. It's not a super fancy card. I think it was $15. It's just an older SanDisk card, but the boot up time took 15 seconds. So if you are looking for something that boots up immediately, the PR-4, at least with the card I'm using, is not that one. It takes some time to boot up. There is no wireless audio monitoring. That is a new standard, not a standard, but it's a new thing, a new feature that Tascam introduced with their FR-AV line of recorders, FR-AV2 and the FR-AV4. This DEITY PR-4 does not have that, so if that's important to you, then good to know.  

Okay, let's compare this to a number of other recorders that are probably its nearest competitors. Number one is Zoom F3. What does the PR-4 do better than the Zoom F3? Number one is the power. You have the internal lithium ion battery. You have the Herosi input, and those both can charge the battery. You don't get that on the F3. You have better UI and ergonomics on the PR-4. In my opinion, this is subjective, but I prefer the way that the PR-4 operates. It's easier to operate from my point of view. You have knobs instead of just a bunch of buttons. The inputs on the PR-4 are digital. You also have a 3.5 millimeter input, which you do not have on the F3, and the XLR inputs are actually combo jacks. So if you're going to be recording from a DJ's mixing board or a mixing board at a live show, it's usually a little easier to get a feed from the board that's a quarter inch input as opposed to XLR. You can usually get it to work either way, but you have to have adapter cables if you only have XLR inputs, but the PR-4 doesn't have just XLR inputs. It has combo inputs, so you're in good shape there. Time code implementation is way better on the PR-4. In my opinion, working with different sets of time code gear, the PR-4 is set up to work with all of them. The F3 is not. The F3 is very specific on which ones will work with it. You have two outputs on the PR-4. You have one output on the F3, 3.5 millimeter unbalanced in both cases. You have redundant recording media in the PR-4. You have a better app, in my opinion. It includes Bluetooth out of the box, and that's a plus or minus depending on how you look at it. I found it more convenient that way. It also has the PR-4, has EQ, has auto mix, has noise reduction that's all included, and the F3 doesn't have any of that as I recall. So you might be asking yourself, Curtis, what does the F3 do better than the PR-4? A couple of things. Number one, it's cheaper, less expensive, and number two, it's much smaller. Here's a Zoom F3. Here's the DEITY PR-4. So that is compared to the Zoom F3. I want to pause and say something here. If you have a Zoom F3 and you're getting good results with it and you like it, that's great. I'm not criticizing it. I'm saying it's a great recorder. If you just want to compare, if you want the context of why I would, if I were buying brand new today, why I might prefer the PR-4, that's why I'm sharing the context here with you. I'm not saying that you can't get good recordings with the Zoom F3. You can, and many people are. But if you wanted, actually, I should say another pro of the F3 is that the corners are all metal. It's a pretty sturdy build right out of the box. You don't have to buy the add-on cage for it. So that's another plus for the Zoom F3.  

All right. Let's move on to the Tascam FR-AV2. What are the things that are better implemented on the PR-4 versus the FR-AV2, which is a little recorder like this. Here's the PR-4 in comparison. FR-AV2 is smaller. All right. What the PR-4 does better is the power implementation is better on the PR-4. It has that internal lithium ion battery that you can swap out, use replaceable batteries. Also has a Herosie input and the Herosie input can charge the battery internally. I prefer the UI and the ergonomics of the PR-4. Again, I like the knobs. So much easier to do certain things that way versus buttons. Just a preference of mine. Again, subjective. It has two outputs, whereas the FR-AV2 has one 3.5 millimeter output. It has redundant media. So the internal SSD plus the SD card. So you have that backup. It includes the Bluetooth module again, whereas that's an add-on for the Tascam. And it has a better app and it also has built-in noise reduction. These are just, again, just very high level. Many of these subjective. What are the things that the FR-AV2 does better than the PR-4? Number one, wireless audio monitoring. Huge feature for some people. Not a huge thing for me, but if that's really important to you, then the FR-AV2 has got PR-4 beat on that front. And then the FR-AV2 has a bigger screen, which is a little easier on the eyes. At least it was for me.  

Let's move on to the sound devices, MixPre 3. What are the features that the PR-4 does better than the MixPre 3? Number one, the inputs are digital capable, whereas they're not on the MixPre, and they are XLR combo jacks. So again, you can use a quarter inch or XLR, whereas on the MixPre, it's XLR only. Timecode implementation is slightly better on the PR-4. Not worlds better, but slightly better. It does have the ability to wirelessly jam with other DEITY timecode products, whereas the MixPre obviously doesn't. And it has a dedicated timecode in-out port, whereas on the MixPre, that timecode port is shared as an auxiliary input as well. So that can be a little bit of a pain. Sometimes you have to plug in and unplug things and you can't run timecode externally into the MixPre and also use a 3.5 millimeter lavalier microphone, for example, at the same time. Auto-mix and noise reduction are included on the PR-4. They are paid add-ons for the MixPre and they are pricey. The Auto-mix is not bad at $100, but the noise reduction is either $300 or $600, depending on how many channels of noise reduction you want to use. And so that adds a lot to the price. The PR-4 has an EQ feature as well, whereas the MixPre does not. Powering is also... I like the PR-4 when it comes to power. Again, that internal lithium ion battery. So you don't need an extra battery sled like the MixPre. And a lot of people have criticisms of the battery sled. I don't love it, but I don't hate it either. Some people really despise it. You have the built-in Herosium put and some people are going to say, "But Curtis, you can buy a battery sled that allows you to use Herosium input on the MixPre." And yes, but you have to buy it. It's built into the PR-4. That's nice. The PR-4 is way more power efficient. You can charge the internal battery from those external outputs on the PR-4 and it has... yeah, just more power efficient. So it's really good. Huge advantage for the PR-4 is the price. It's basically half the price of a MixPre 3. It's physically smaller and it does have a much better app than the Sound Devices Wingman app.  

All right, what are the things that are better on the F... or sorry, the MixPre 3 versus the PR-4? Now this is a full disclosure. My favorite prosumer recorder is a Sound Devices MixPre. I'm going to just level with you. So there are some things that the MixPre does better, but if I were buying today and I were on a tighter budget, I would have no qualms about buying a PR-4 instead. But there are still some things that are better on the MixPre. Number one, the build quality. There is no contest here. Everything, the knobs, everything feels more solid to me. The case is all metal right out of the box. I've never had... I've never sustained physical damage to a MixPre and I've had MixPre since 2017 at least. Whenever they first came out is when I got my first one. I've never had problems with the battery sled. Others have reported problems with the battery sled talking about bent power pins and stuff like that. I've never had that problem, but I suppose that could be a problem. I would say the other thing though about the MixPre is that it's repairable. When you buy from Zoom or you buy from Tascam at this level or you buy from DEITY, they're consumer electronics products basically, which means that once they're in a warranty, the companies themselves don't provide repair services generally. I don't know, there's nothing on the DEITY's website or Tascam's website or Zoom's website about repairing your products. Sound devices actually does that. Now granted, it could be very, very pricey, but it is repairable. So that's a consideration. The headphone amp. The DEITY PR-4's headphone amp is actually quite good. It can drive, it drives I think up to 300 milliwatts per channel. It's the same as the MixPre. The only difference between them is it sounded to me like the DEITY PR-4's headphone amp was a little brighter. It seemed a little colored relative to the MixPre's headphone amp. Again, subjective. Maybe that's a problem. Maybe it's not. I feel like I could still make good recordings with the PR-4 to be fair. There's a better audio interface than the MixPre by far. You can use it for inputs and outputs. You can route the audio in a pretty flexible sort of way. So if you're going to use one of these as an audio interface full-time, or you know, when you're at your computer, I think the MixPre is a much better option there. You do have an additional XLR input on the MixPre 3. MixAssist did a better job, I thought, subjectively. We'll have to dive into that in a little bit more detail. NoiseAssist was more configurable. In other words, you weren't limited to just 6 dB of attenuation. You could go up to 20 dB of attenuation. Granted, under almost all circumstances, 20 dB of attenuation was a bad idea because you started cutting into the dialogue. But the point is you had a little bit more control over it. You could go more aggressive than 6 dB. But what's good about the PR-4 noise reduction is at least in my testing, it was pretty much impossible to start introducing artifacts. You may not have got as much noise reduction as you wanted, but it was really good. It just sounded good. So that's a good thing. So you might be thinking to yourself, "Kurtis, why would you ever choose a MixPre? It costs twice as much, hardly better, and any things that matter to you. If those things don't matter to you, that's fine. Don't buy a MixPre. Buy a PR-4 instead, if you like." At the end of the day, I think you can make a good recording with all of these. Tazcam, Zoom, DEITY, MixPre. By the way, this entire episode is recorded on the PR-4, just so you're aware. Anna Sennheiser MKH50. I think that's everything. Get out there and make some great sound. Talk to you again soon.