Simple recorder purpose full#
Simple recorder purpose portable#
Simple recorder purpose plus#

It's more likely to appeal to someone recording music or plays etc rather than interviewing people. The Tascam has two omnidirectional mics so it will produce a less focused, more ambient stereo sound than the Zoom H1 V2.

This is selling for £88 at .uk, though it's currently even better value at : $86.96, reduced from $179.99. (The thing about real acoustic recording is that you also record extraneous sounds such as dogs barking at police cars, even though you didn't hear them at the time.)Īnd for only a little more money, you can get the real thing: a Tascam DR-05. This should give you a good stereo effect with two or three people sitting side-by-side, without picking up too much sound from the rest of the room. The Zoom H1 V2 has two microphones in what audio fans will recognise as an X-Y configuration.

Simple recorder purpose portable#

Today, you can get a Zoom H1 V2 for only £79.Īlthough Amazon lists the Handy H1 V2 microSD recorder with its office products as a Portable Digital Voice Recorder Dictaphone, it has a lot in common with products such as the £229 Zoom H4n, which are listed in Amazon's music category.

Until quite recently, this would have been way over your budget (I paid £250 for my Roland Edirol R-09H). However, if you want to capture a naturalistic soundscape with two or three people talking, then you need a different type of product: a stereo sound recorder, rather than a voice recorder. If you just want to capture clear voices, both will do the job. The RRP is £69.99 and .uk has it for £49.98.īoth of these recorders have 'scene' commands to handle different recording situations, such as (on the Olympus) Memo, Meeting and Conference.

Simple recorder purpose plus#

The VN-713PC has a neat little kick-stand built in, plus noise cancellation to reduce the effect of background noises such as air conditioning. This is another WMA/MP3 mono voice recorder with USB connectivity, but it has 4GB of built-in storage and a microSD card slot instead of an SD slot. The Olympus VN-713PC is also worth considering. You could add a cheap clip-on microphone for recording one parent at a time. The recommended retail price is £52.99 but .uk has them for £33.06, which is good value. Unlike most handheld voice recorders, it also takes SD memory cards (not supplied), and you can connect it to your PC's USB port. Your cheapest option is a good quality dictation machine such as the Sony ICD-PX312, which has 2GB of built-in storage and can record to MP3 files. MP3 can produce excellent sound quality at high bit-rates (up to 320kbps) and the files will play on virtually every device. The overlap is that both types of machine can record MP3 files, which I assume is what you have in mind. Post-processing is done on a PC, but if you want to use the recorder to listen to what you recorded, you may well have to use headphones. Typical applications include broadcast journalism and podcasting, simple home recording, and making soundtracks for short films, which nowadays may be shot with DSLR cameras. These recorders are often used on a small stand or mini-tripod, sometimes with an external microphone. People tend to record uncompressed WAV files that take up huge amounts of space, but when you've filled one SD card, you simply slot in another (and change the batteries).

Simple recorder purpose full#

The music products are aimed at people who want to record sounds or live music in CD- or twice CD-quality with a full spectrum of stereo sound. The leading suppliers in this market are Olympus and Sony. They also include small loudspeakers so you can listen to the recording.

If you use these devices for interviews, as journalists do, they work best if you thrust them fairly close to the person's mouth. Cut-off filters may be used to cut down background noise. The audio requirement is clarity, not fidelity, so sound is usually mono, and a bit rate of 192kbps in Microsoft's WMA (Windows Media Audio) format counts as 'super high-quality' (SHQ). The main features are long recording times and long battery life. Your application falls nicely into the hole between the two.ĭictation products are aimed at recording voices either for memo-taking or transcription. The remaining market for more powerful devices has two major segments: dictation and music. The voice recorder market, like the compact camera market, is under pressure from mobile phones, which do a reasonable job without you having to carry an extra device around. What could I get on a budget of £50 to £60, if anything? I need something less hissy than a digital notetaker but not something so fancy only the BBC could afford to buy it. I'm looking for a digital voice recorder to collect my parents' oral history, so that the grandchildren can listen to it in 20 years' time.