Marantz PMD201

The broadcast field recorder that ran on three D-cells and outlasted the news cycle.

Overview

The PMD201 is a two-head, mono portable cassette recorder, and the way Marantz's own literature frames it is telling: the company marketed the PMD200 series as a range of five portables meant to match a buyer's application, and the PMD201 sat at the practical bottom of that ladder. It is the machine without the third head. Where the PMD221 and PMD222 let an engineer monitor off the tape while recording, the PMD201 gives you two heads and no confidence monitoring — you commit to the take and find out later.

What it does give you is a working field kit in one box. Marantz's distributor materials specify 7.5 hours of continuous recording on three D-size batteries, with an AC power supply included rather than sold as an extra. That detail matters more than it sounds: the scaled-down PMD101 in the same catalog required a separately ordered DA36 adaptor, so the PMD201's bundled supply was a deliberate step up the range. An optional NiCad rechargeable pack was offered as well, quoted at 5.5 hours of use — a meaningful drop from the alkaline figure, and worth knowing before anyone plans a long location day around rechargeables.

The feature set is broadcast-oriented rather than hi-fi-oriented. There is a modular telephone jack for direct telephone recording and playback, a switchable limiter, a built-in electret condenser microphone and monitor speaker, variable speed, three-position mic attenuation, line input and output jacks, cue and review, volume and tone controls, and a choice of automatic or manual record level. The three-position tape selector covers normal, CrO2, and metal formulations. An anti-roll transport and a three-digit tape counter round out the working controls, along with an external speaker jack and a three-position automatic noise cancel switch. For a mono reporter's deck, that is a serious complement of switches — the kind of thing you appreciate at 2 a.m. when the phone line is your only feed.

Pricing is where the period record gets genuinely interesting, because the sources disagree. One distributor sheet lists the PMD201 at a manufacturer's list of $399.00, discounted to $323.00, while another lists the same machine at $299.00. A third retailer sheet quotes a list of $409.00 against a $299.00 selling price. Collectors chasing an original invoice should treat the $299 figure as the recurring street number and the $399–$409 range as list, with the usual caveat that dealer sheets from this era were printed at different moments and rarely reconciled with each other.

The PMD200 series as a whole was positioned by Marantz as the most popular portable mono cassette recorders used in broadcast, and the family structure bears that out: the PMD221 added the third head for tape monitoring at a list of $369.00, and the PMD222 added XLR microphone inputs at $399.00. The PMD201 was the entry point, and it was priced accordingly.