Review Desk · Audio
Kestrel 2 Field Recorder
The best-sounding budget field kit we've tested.
Tested by D. Rao·Thursday 3 September 2026·Six weeks, 41 hours of field recording
We took the Kestrel 2 to a monsoon-season shoot in Wayanad and a noisy market floor in Delhi, and the story was the same in both: the preamps are the reason to buy this recorder. Push them to 62 dB and the noise floor stays where cheaper units start to hiss.
The chassis is the second reason. Ours went off a low wall onto concrete on day nine and kept recording. The software is the compromise — functional, logically ordered, but slower to move through than the hardware deserves.
In its favour
- +Preamps stay clean past 60 dB of gain
- +Metal chassis survived a 1.2 m drop onto concrete
- +Records to two cards simultaneously
Against
- −Menu system is three taps deeper than it needs to be
- −No native 32-bit float capture