Monday, October 8, 2007

Sony's Flash Recorder Surpasses DAT Quality

The Sony Professional Portable 24-bit Linear Audio Recorder is a great addition to you mobile multimedia recording studio, you know that one you carry around all day ready to fire up at the drop of a new gadget. Bloggers, podcasters, reporters, musicians, and maybe the occasional aural artist would seem to be the audience for the Sony PCM-D50.

High quality recording is no problem here; bit rates vary from 22 kHz/16 bits to 96 kHz/ 24 bits. The available recording time corresponds with the quality of the recording and the memory present. With the 4Gb that comes built in the recorder it is a formidable foe recording up to 13hrs, but add a memory stick and you're recording long after other recorders have retreated in defeat.

Signal to noise ratio is rather low producing what Sony classifies as "noise-free" recording. Due to this low signal to noise ratio first time testers have found the handling noise was greatly reduced, if not eliminated, which is not the case with some other recorder in the same price range.

The recording format is your standard .WMA with playback in the same format or .MP3. The recorder connects via high speed USB, drag and drop on Mac/Windows. The real gems of the system are the built in condenser microphones these are prefect for the on the street interview and relatively any other application, but if these don’t do it for you, you can plug an external microphone. Be forewarned, if your external microphone requires power, the Sony PCM-D50 doesn’t provide any additional power so unless you what to drop some extra cash on an adapter...stick with the built-in jump offs. The list price is $599.

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