Sony shows off advanced digital voice recorders

Dictaphones: that’s what they used to be called. Today, though, those silly little cassette tapes and fiddly controls have all but gone and we’ve turned digital.

In fact, after years of wanting a digital recorder, I now use my iPhone. However, there are still some nice features on these new recorders from Sony that would make me look twice at getting one.

Obviously they’re digital. That means you can store a huge amount of audio on the solid state disk, with no fear of quality degradation. It’s all nicely indexed, so no fast forwarding and rewinding (unless you liked listening to high-pitched squeaking as you tried to find your place).

Claiming to be unique, these recorders feature three microphones. Two allow stereo sound to be recorded, while a powerful direction mic is in place for singling out distant speakers.

As well as long-record mode for cramming up to 1,505 hours on up to 4GB of memory, there’s Linear PCM mode for recording high quality music and other audio. As it’s all USB based, the devices can also be used as portable drives for other files.

Available in eight models of varying capacities and types of battery (either rechargeable or AAA) and bundled with digital voice editing software from Dragon.

Sony