What is the best voice recording device on the market?

Factual Questions
1

In my misspent youth in the 70’s & 80’s I remember various “Professional” Marantz -Superscope etc. portable cassette tape recorders that were the standard for reporters recording voice. Voice quality with the little handheld cassette recorders units I sold as a Radio Shack Manager way back when, were usually pretty crappy and the integrated mike picked up tons of unit (motor) noise in addition to the voice.

Last week a friend asked me if I had voice recorder her daughter could use for a interview (she’s a trainee reporter). I didn’t have any units on hand, but I got to wondering what the gold standard for voice recording was these days. I’ve tried various chip style recorders over the past few years and they seems pretty crappy, which was surprising as I thought getting rid of the tape drive motor would increase voice quality substantially, and it didn’t. Voices are still muffled and indistinct unless the unit is very close to the speaker tons of background (environmental) noise is usually present.

If someone wanted to get the best live voice recording these days what device would they look to?

2

The microphone makes the difference. Will you pay a thousand for one that works great but is unobtrusive?

3

Near as I can tell, it’s still Marantz. They put out a portable (though fairly big) digital audio recorder that uses microdrives or compact flash cards. I believe this is what professional news organizations issue to field correspondants.

http://www.d-mpro.com/users/folder.asp?FolderID=3689&CatID=19&SubCatID=180

4

May not still be true but Uher used to be the weapon of choice for the majority of reporters I knew.

5

I can’t tell you what radio professionals in general are using, but as a professional print journalist, I have been happily using Sony mini-disc (MD) recorders for several years. And the first time I saw one being used, it was by a radio reporter.

Mini-disc recorders are small, convenient, relatively inexpensive, and provide excellent audio quality. As with most digital formats, you can choose several different modes, trading quality for recording length. Discs are relatively cheap. Standard discs are available for less that $2 each, and the high-capacity 1GB discs are about $6. Standard discs can hold between 2 and 10 hours of stereo digital audio, and the 1GB can hold between 8 and 32 hours.

The newest generation of MD recorder, known as Hi-MD, allows you to copy the recordings directly to your computer and work with them in digital format, although you’ll have to put up with some fairly crappy, DRM-laden Sony software. But the original MD format could only be copied to your computer through the analog headphone output, in real time, so Hi-MD is an improvement. Hi-MD devices can connect via USB, and be a storage device on your computer for any kind of file.

The advantage of MD over solid state digital recorders is that you can fill up as many discs as you want in the field, without having to dump the recordings to a computer once the memory is filled up. If you want, you can keep the discs as a permanent record, although you can, of course, erase and reuse them.

As others have said, the key to a qualty recording is a high-quality mike. My first MD recorder cost me $125 on eBay, but I paid $150 for the mike. Research carefully and choose wisely. (I bought this one.)

I use my MD to record interviews and speeches at conferences I cover for my publication. I used to use micro-cassettes, and those recordings were often unintelligible when I tried to transcribe them later on. But even at the lowest quality (which is all I need) the MD will pick up someone whispering on the other side of a large room. In stereo.

Here are several sites with more info on MD:

Minidisco, which has a helpful FAQ as well as other good info about MD and a reasonable selection of hardware.
Sound Professionals, a good source for good mikes.
Mini-discussion, a forum all about MD. Go here for info about how to overcome some of the shortcomings of Sony’s software.

Feel free to ask any questions you may have. Good luck.

6

The radio reporters I know have been using Sony Mini-Discs.

However, every one of them uses a different microphone. The mic makes all the difference.