ZOOM LIVETRAK L-12 Portable Multi-track Recorder

As soon as the LiveTrak L-12 was shelled from its packaging, the office immediately transitioned into a battle over portastudio pasts. Age is the real winner in this game, distinguished by the format you first started recording on — whether rolls of tapes, cassettes, ZIP disks or SD cards — but somewhere along the way most recordists have touched some device with a portastudio form factor. If you haven’t, Zoom now has you covered.

FIVE IN ONE

While a hard disk portastudio isn’t exactly top of my wishlist when it comes to review gear, having just struggled through a firmware update on a $4000 audio interface, the little self-contained Zoom was suddenly looking a whole lot more attractive.

You really have to dig deep to understand the LiveTrak; while it looks like a ‘portastudio’, it’s