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The world needs to save energy:

• turn down your heating

• have a car-free day once a week

• boil less water in your kettle

• turn the TV off at night

We all need to think before using more energy than we really need.

We’re often asked about the small digital recorders made by Sony, Olympus and many other manufacturers.

There’s no doubt that they are very attractive - small, silver and sexy -  but, in most cases, they were never designed for high quality acquisition, but for dictation or note-taking. The key features of these functions are intelligibility and long recording times, rather than high quality and so they aren’t really suited for oral history/speech recording.

Also -

• they may use proprietary file formats exclusive to that manufacturer, which may be difficult to work with and/or convert to generic formats like WAV, MP2 or MP3 which we all know and love for editing, archiving or distribution.
• it may be difficult to use external microphones, or you may be tied to models from that manufacturer
• the compression used to achieve long recording times can be very severe
• they are very small, with even smaller buttons, and can be easily lost or dropped out of pockets and bags.

If you really want them, we can get them - call for prices - but we feel they may turn out to be a false economy.

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