+44 845 838 5121

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We’re often asked about the small digital recorders made by Sony, Olympus and many other manufacturers.

There’s no doubt that they are very attractive - small, silver and sexy -  but, in most cases, they were never designed for high quality acquisition, but for dictation or note-taking. The key features of these functions are intelligibility and long recording times, rather than high quality and so they aren’t really suited for oral history/speech recording.

Also -

• they may use proprietary file formats exclusive to that manufacturer, which may be difficult to work with and/or convert to generic formats like WAV, MP2 or MP3 which we all know and love for editing, archiving or distribution.
• it may be difficult to use external microphones, or you may be tied to models from that manufacturer
• the compression used to achieve long recording times can be very severe
• they are very small, with even smaller buttons, and can be easily lost or dropped out of pockets and bags.

If you really want them, we can get them - call for prices - but we feel they may turn out to be a false economy.

Our number is +44 845 838 5121.