Portable Digital Audio Recorder Buying Guide With Reviews
Written by Chad Criswell
Buying a portable digital audio recorder is a major decision. The balance between price, features, and quality is a fine line that has many different options to choose from. There are dozens of different models of portable digital audio recorders, some of which have drastically different sets of features yet sell for roughly the same price. This easy to read head to head comparison chart and guide to many of the more popular portable digital audio recorders is intended to help potential buyers more easily see these differences and make an educated buying decision.
To compare these portable audio recorders with other similar desktop based recorders from other companies please visit our Desktop Digital Recorder Buying Guide
I would also strongly recommend the MicroTrack II from M-Audio. They just dropped the price to $199 (http://store.soundtree.com/maudio-microtrack-ii-m obile-digital-recorder.html). I personally believe that it is the best handheld recorder on the market.
Yamaha just dropped the MAP price of the Pocketrak 2G to $149 and the CX to MAP $249.
BTW, the Pocketrak 2G is a little unique as it is the only one of the products you reviewed that has an omni directional microphone. An omni directional microphone means that the mic picks up sound equally in all directions. This is a good choice for recording marching bands on a field and other situations where you can't allows place the recorder exactly where you'd liek for a perfect stereo field recording.
All of the products you reviewed are high quality and eay to use. Which ever you portable recrder you choose it will be a real benefit to your teaching activities and ability to collaborate and share recordings with your students.
The beauty of all of these is that they record in a format that can be easily copied to your computer, emailed to students and then played back on any computer with a media player like Windows Media Player.
I was interested to read your review of the Zoom H4N. I wish to know if it is sold with Cubase LE from zoom or is that dependent on which stores sell it? I would like to buy it with this included software. Can you help? thanks.
Rodolfo Vivanco L
- Direct Sound Field Digitall recorder
|173.27.214.xxx
|2009-11-04 15:31:56
HI, Im a direct Sound Tech, I work with tv and advertising, and I was looking for a portable solution for audio back up. and I cant decide yet, does anyone know here how this guys behave with line signal and if the audio file will sync with the video file perfectly ( heard some Zoom products had problems with hat issue)