Flash Recorders

Sony PCM-D1

I am a sound engineer by profession and so I get asked pretty frequently why on earth I’m still recording things with a titchy Sony minidisc machine rather than one of the fancy new Flash recorders. For those of you who don’t do recording, Flash recorders, or more correctly solid-state recorders, are the next big thing in portable recording equipment. They store the sound onto a memory card and you can then import that audio into your computer extremely quickly, much faster than real-time. The reason why I still use a minidisc is that although I’ve looked at loads of Flash recorders I still haven’t found one that is better than what I’m using at the moment once you consider size, cost, quality and convenience.
However, minidisc is dead as a format, thanks to Sony’s insane money-grabbing policies, so I know that I’ll have to get a Flash recorder eventually. Since I’m sure that there are plenty of other people with the same dilemma, I’ve put together a collection of my thoughts on all the Flash recorders that I know about. You’ll find it on the Flash Recorders page. If you have any opinions or facts to add, please tell me so that I can incorporate them into the article.

3 thoughts on “Flash Recorders

  1. One reason I still like minidisc is that it doesn’t do fast download to a computer. When I was still a journalist I would use the opportunity to listen and make notes on my interviews as I played them into the computer to help make editing decisions.

  2. I think you may be onto something. The idea of using ‘recycled media’ is particularly appealing. If only it could also use 16Mb CF cards in a pseudo-RAID array, I’ve got millions of them.

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