SonyICD PX333 Digital Voice Recorder

I bought this DVR almost a year ago, but didn't have occasion to use it until yesterday, when I recorded an administrative hearing I was conducting. In a nutshell, I was blown away by the quality of the recording. The hearing took place in an average-sized conference room at an oblong table that seats four on each side and one at each end. I was at the head of the table, and planted the DVR about an arm's length away from me. I put it on a beanbag-style smartphone stand that tilted the DVR back at a 45 degree angle and set it to record in Meeting mode. There were seven people at the table most of the time. The people who spoke were for the most part seated at the front half of the table. When listened to on my computer, the resultant file was excellent. Witnesses, even those who were soft-spoken, sounded clear as a bell with excellent fidelity. There was no boominess, background hum, hiss or crackle. I'll have no trouble reviewing the testimony when drafting the decision. My only fear was hitting the wrong button and messing up the recording - or forgetting to hit record after a break - but I practiced at home the night before, and everything went A-OK.When connected to my iMac with the included mini- (not micro-) USB cable, the DVR mounts as a volume with no problem, and the MP3 files created by the DVR open automatically in iTunes when double-clicked. The Windows software has a combine files feature, which unfortunately is not included in the Mac software. This could be useful if I want to record a long hearing as a series of separate files, or if I accidentally hit the stop button instead of the pause button when recording.If anybody has any recording or usage tips, please reply in the comments.

I wish I'd bought this thing 20 years ago! It's easy to use if all you're doing is recording your voice and managing the MP3 files. (It's got a lot of extra features when synched to a computer which I simply don't use, so I don't know how user-friendly those features are.) It's easy to navigate, and if you plug it into your computer, your computer will treat it sort of like a flash drive and you can copy and drag the MP3 files to your computer, and you can also rename the 5 default folders that come programmed on it. I was quite impressed with the audio quality -- I could barely hear the traffic when I walked down the sidewalk during rush-hour while talking into it, and I put it in my open purse and walked across the room and talked in a fairly low indoor-voice to simulate recording people talking in a meeting or a soft-spoken interviewee, and it picked up every word clearly. It's really tiny too, smaller than the remote for my TV, so perfect fit for a purse. I carry it with me everywhere now, everyday, as a convenient alternative to having to stop and write down miscellaneous blog-post ideas as they occur to me at otherwise very inconvenient times.

I had one of these for over two years then I lost it while in the woods. All of the features matched my needs. The ability to store music, podcast, and make my own voice recordings made it a one-device does all for me. You can set date/time on recordings (music or voice recording) to play as an alarm so I wake up to a different song each day of the week. The sound quality is excellent and when you use Sony's Sound Organizer you can easily set-up podcast downloads, move music and recordings to/from your PC. Anyway, I lost one of these and I looked for it for a month or two and I just couldn't stand being without it so I bought this replacement. I didn't rate it at 5 stars because the display isn't back-lit. Everything is great on this device except you can't see the screen in low light without you flashlight or something. Some folks say the menus are complicated but I disagree. The right-left button scrolls through the top level menu and then there is a choice for "Details" to take you to a second level. A different list of menu items may appear if you are in playback or record mode. It wasn't long for me to get familiar with how it works. Oh and the batteries...I have left it running all night in the woods to "listen" for game sounds. I retrieve it and review the recording in Sound Organizer for peaks in the sound graph. I can do this three nights on one pair of batteries. It's very efficient with energy consumption. It can go 16-20 hours easy on a battery and records.Another cool thing about this device is it has an external speaker so you can chose to use ear phones or just playback through the speaker. It also has a mic-in jack so you can add one of those ear piece microphones and record meetings or conference calls for later use to take notes. All in all, I have been very pleased with this device and my 15 year-old son has bought one and is using it to keep all of his music on now...and he has iPhone and other devices but he likes this thing better.