Quality Dictaphone

October 1, 2011 1:25 PM

Can anyone reccomend a quality dictaphone (up to £150) for recording interviews in noisy enviroments?
posted by nam3d to Technology (4 answers total)

I've got an older Philips Voice Tracer model (720) which I've used for about 50 interviews in different environments and am extremely satisfied with it, so would recommend investigating the newer ones in the line, all of which are well within budget. However, I think adding a unidirectional microphone will make a much bigger difference than the quality of the recorder itself - I'll defer to others on the specific mic recommendations.
posted by carbide at 1:38 PM on October 1, 2011

I used a Zoom H2 to great effect, in noisy environments (busy coffee shops, etc), when doing several rounds of interviewing. On Amazon.com, it's retailing for $142.77, so if it's not available in the UK, perhaps you can order it from there. Well within your budget!
posted by artemisia at 4:01 PM on October 1, 2011

Any modern voice recorder will do, as mentioned by carbide earlier... get a good external unidirectional microphone; that will make the the result much much better.

I have the Olympus VN-8700PC (http://goo.gl/VVVvr) which I love very much and use every day. It is mono though, if you need a stereo recorder you might want to consider Olympus WS-750M (http://goo.gl/h2uEt) or something else.
posted by bbxx at 7:01 PM on October 1, 2011

My husband has been very happy with his Sony digital recorders of various makes for interviewing (he's a journalist). The Olympus ones above are good too. His have died due to children messing with them, not the quality. You can usually ask the shop to let you try out the models if you're worried about clarity.

Another option is to get a good small microphone for your iphone or android if you have one. If you only occasionally do interviews, a good small microphone for your phone can be sufficient.

Double-check the audio format the recorder takes - with the Sony I think he had to convert all the audio files so he could easily play them on his mac, and was annoyed at the extra step.
posted by viggorlijah at 7:40 PM on October 1, 2011