The Best Voice Recorder
If you need a basic digital voice
recorder for lectures, indoor / outdoor interviews, office meetings and
personal memos, I’d recommend the $66 Sony ICD-AX412.
It has the best combination of useful features we could find. It's the
best that we tested at recording voices clearly in a number of settings
and situations, and it has great battery life.
After more than 25 hours of research, including weeks of
personal testing and multiple interviews with audio engineers and
recording professionals, the AX412 emerged as the most flexible and
easy-to-use voice recorder for most people.
“Most people” is key here. If you’re an oral historian, a
professional (or amateur) musician, or if you’re producing stories for
“This American Life,” this recommendation obviously isn’t relevant.
Hopefully, you already have a pretty good idea of what you want/need.
Why a voice recorder?
Professionals aside, there are still plenty of people out
there who may need something basic to regularly record meetings and/or
interviews. If that describes you, here’s a little secret. You really
don’t need to spend any more than $100 on a digital recorder. The reason
for this is simple: smartphones.
You really don’t need to spend any more than $100 on a digital recorder.
In fact, a professional or even music-centric recorder can
actually be worse for basic voice recording. We’ll talk more about this
later, but basically, it boils down to a trade off between clarity
(understandability) and fidelity (true-to-life accuracy). Granted, they
don’t necessarily have to be mutually exclusive things, but frequently
there’s a purposeful emphasis on one or the other. If, say, you design a
digital recorder to accurately reproduce a super wide frequency range
and capture all the nuance of a musical performance, it can be difficult
to also isolate or emphasize certain parts of that recording. Like
voices. Even with all the tricks employed to bring out someone’s speech,
some very high-end recorders just won’t be able to a very good job.
While the $66 AX412 isn’t flawless, it’s easy to use and,
of the five $100-and-under units we tested (after eliminating dozens
with research), it offered the best combination of good sound quality,
great battery life and a smattering of useful features, including track
marking, voice-dependent start and stop, and scene-based recording
modes. It also succumbed less often to wind and handling noise and was
able to clearly pick up voices up to 50 feet away.
Wait, aren’t basic voice recorders obsolete?
Good question! The somewhat surprising answer is no.
Granted, you probably already have one in your pocket or bag right now
(That’d be your smartphone). And yes, in some ways your phone can be a
good option for on-the-spot recording. It’s always with you, for one
thing. You also can choose from hundreds of recording apps—many of which
will integrate with other note-taking productivity apps—and you can
even do some on-the-fly EQ tweaking and rudimentary editing during and
after recording. Useful stuff in a pinch, for sure. But standalone
recorders are still better for their interfaces (buttons) and
microphones.
Ever tried to record a one-on-one interview on your phone in a crowded, bustling conference hall?
Smartphone mics are, by nature, small. And they’re getting
smaller as phones get thinner. Because they’re also meant solely for
talking on the phone and making words coherent, they employ something
called a high pass filter (also known, confusingly, as a low cut
filter). This cuts off bass lower in frequency than 300 Hz. Wind noise
(or wind buffeting) happens at around 270 Hz. So if you’ve ever wondered
why people’s voices sound so tinny and thin on a mobile phone, now you
know. You’re basically losing the entire low end of everyone’s voice.
Standalone recorders often have a similar feature to block out unwanted
noise, but allow you to turn it off and on depending on the situation.
Smartphones do not.
In contrast to a smartphone, a dedicated recorder has larger,
higher-quality integrated mics—usually omnidirectional condensers. That
means better-sounding recordings and more adaptability for recording in
different contexts and settings. It’s also a simpler device, meaning
fewer things are likely to go wrong with it. Even the budget models now
have some sort of scene presets that attempt to sculpt the sound to
match your setting. These usually include and meeting, conference and
memo settings.
In addition to sound-quality, veteran radio producer Jeff Towne—who also happens to review high-end professional digital recorders for Transom—points
out that dedicated units are usually easier to use, less likely to
crash or freeze and more likely to have options oriented toward specific
audio recording situations. Oh, and you’ll get far better battery life
because your actual recording isn’t competing with a bunch of other apps
and various on-board radios for power.
The fact is, if you plan on doing any sort of regular voice
recording, a standalone unit almost always offers more flexibility and
better sound quality. Period. Even the cheaper models.
Don’t get us wrong, the years of the budget recorder may
very well be numbered. But if you plan on doing a good amount of
recording for work, school, or just for a personal project, it’s still
worth buying a standalone unit.
What constitutes a good voice recorder?
The easy (and always infuriating) answer is that it depends
what you want to do with it. A great professional recorder won’t always
be a good fit in many basic voice-recording scenarios. (Pros frequently
bypass the onboard mics anyway, even on higher-end models, and instead
use standalone mics tailored for the specific situation at hand.) And a
basic model would likewise be horrible for things like field recording
and editing. Put simply, there’s often either an emphasis on clarity or
fidelity—usually not both.
To that end, many higher-end models have bigger capsules
with more surface area and can capture a greater frequency range. Some
of them even let you adjust the position of the mics. As you’ll see
though, that doesn’t always work to a voice recorder’s advantage. While a
wide frequency range is good for pros who can then edit and fine tune
the sounds they record, normal people just want something that they can
play back with clarity on the first go.
…we were more concerned with clarity,
wanting an all-purpose voice recorder that would perform well in as many
different nonprofessional contexts as possible.
Of course, nothing in this price range (or any price range)
is going to be perfect in every scenario. But our pick also needed to
have some way of canceling out, or at least reducing, irrelevant noise
to reproduce voices in a clear, articulate way. As we explained above,
depending on the method used noise canceling can actually make
recordings sound pretty horrible, so that was an issue too. And of
course the recorder needed to be relatively small, easy to use and have
great battery life.
How we selected
The top five contenders.
First we had to determine a reasonable price range. Given
we were dealing with something that was better sounding and more
adaptable than your average smartphone, yet still a far cry from top of
the line, we settled on lower end of the pricing spectrum: $50 to $100.
There are quite a few units below this price—usually $30 to $50—but most
don’t have expandable memory or dual stereo mics. You might think the
latter is inconsequential to voice recording, but a nice stereo sound
image is much more pleasant to listen to for hours on end when you’re
transcribing a long interview.
As you might guess, there are no professional reviews of
any kind at this price point, so our hunt started by talking to a
handful of audio engineers, print and radio journalist friends, and
other recording professionals to get a sense of their favorite brands
and what features they find most useful. A pattern quickly emerged. Most
currently use (or have used) a Sony or Olympus. Many switch back and
forth. The two companies more or less dominate the market.
After cobbling together a list of 20 some
candidates based on those conversations and our own research, we
refined with our predetermined price range and other relevant criteria.
In the end, we zeroed in on five finalists that were
representative of the top online retail consumer picks in the overall
price spectrum we had selected. They were (in no particular order) the Olympus VN-702PC and WS-802, the Sony ICD-AX412, the Zoom H1, and the Tascam DR-05.
Testing methodology
After consulting with one of our own resident audio
aficionados, Lauren Dragan, as well as an expert at Blue Microphones, we
came up with a series of real-world tests for our finalists. First, I
had a basic, one-on-one conversation with each recorder in a busy cafe
to get a sense of how well they could eliminate background noise and
focus on just two voices. This was done in both in standard recording
mode and with any interview setting activated.
Next, all five were set up at 15-, 25-, and 50-foot
intervals from a high-quality recorded voice (Peter Finch’s ‘mad as
hell’ speech in “Network” played on a Blu-ray through my GoldenEar
soundbar) to see how they performed in a more lecture
hall/auditorium-ish setting with a fluctuating and dynamic voice.
I also arranged all five recorders in a smaller room with a
single source of noise—a fan on high in one instance and a “sleep
machine” white noise generator in another—to again see how well they
could block out or minimize a single source of background noise.
(Additionally, they were all placed directly in the path of a
high-powered oscillating fan to measure how well they did with simulated
wind noise.)
Finally, I recorded myself heavily pawing all of them,
sticking them in pockets and into and out of bags, to see how well they
dealt with general manipulation noise.
Why the AX412?
The Sony AX412
wasn’t great at everything by a longshot, but it was quite good at a
few really important things: voice clarity, extra features that actually
worked and overall consistent performance.
First and foremost, the Sony did the best overall job of
blocking out irrelevant/bothersome ambient noise while retaining a clear
vocal recording.
And it did this in more testing situations than any other
recorder, regardless of its positioning. As mentioned above, all of the
models we tested had at least some form of noise cancellation, but the
Sony was able to do its job effectively without significantly altering
voices and making them sound distant or thin. Both the Olympuses made
voices clear, but they weren’t as full-sounding and realistic in my
opinion. A minor difference, but I would argue it’s important if you
plan on doing any transcribing.
In particular, the Sony’s meeting scene
setting picked up voices clearly in a surprising number of
positions–even at a distance of 15 feet and in a crowded cafe facing
away from the two speakers.
We found the built-in kickstand also helped a great deal,
angling the recorder at convenient 45 degrees and making it far less
susceptible to vibrations from the table and ground. (The only other
recorder with a similar stand we tested was the Olympus VN-702PC).
Similarly, the Sony and both Olympuses had what is
essentially voice-regulated recording modes that automatically start
when sound above a certain decibel level is detected and stop when it’s
absent. For recording situations with a lot of pauses, this is nice as
the resulting “dead air” is essentially edited out for you. Again, the
Sony was really the only unit that consistently did a reasonable job
here. It wasn’t perfect, and if you spoke too quietly, it would often
stop. But compared to the Olympuses, which required someone more or less
yelling into the mics for them to begin, it was a lot more seamless and
consistent.
Finally, the Sony dealt with sound level fluctuations
handily, rarely distorting and yet still rendering even soft voices that
were up to 25 feet away in a clear, discernible way. In short, it
didn’t always produce the best sounding results every time and in every
situation, but it was regularly at the top for most tests.
And when you factor in that it also had the best battery
life, a very reasonable price point, and useful extras like the ability
to highlight and jump to certain points of a recording, that sealed the
deal. Not to mention that it was the easiest to use, came with a
much-needed carrying pouch and was the least susceptible overall to wind
and breath plosives (“p-pops”).
The rest of the competition
We should stress here that even though the Sony fared
better overall, there were far more similarities between most of these
recorders than differences. Not surprisingly though, it was the more
expensive recorders that tended to produce better-sounding and more
musical recordings—particularly those able to record in uncompressed
formats and higher bit rates. This included not just the Olympus WS-802,
but also the $100 Zoom H1 and Tascam DR-05.
The Olympus WS-802 on the left and the Sony AX412 on the right.
Olympus WS-802
– There was certainly a lot to like about the 802. And for some more
specific use-cases, it may even be the better choice. It had the best
directionality of all the units I tested, based (I’m presuming) on the
fact that its mics are in fact directional (vs omnidirectional in the
rest). When pointed at the sound source it did a great job honing in on
voices, picking them up from up to 50 feet away. When not positioned
correctly, however, it suffered more than other recorders—even when
using the various voice enhancement functions.
The 802 was also the only voice-centric recorder that was
able to record in both PCM and 320 kbps MP3. We didn’t feel those were
of particular benefit here, as voices still sounded slightly artificial
and trebly when using those formats.
Of the five we tested, it’s worth noting that the WS-802
has the most built-in memory (4 GB vs 2 GB on the other four), but that
seemed hardly consequential considering all were easily expandable using
relatively cheap microSD cards. Furthermore, with the built-in 2 GB you
can get about 22 hours of recording time at 192 kbps, more than enough
for most people. Ultimately, for our specific use-case, we felt it
wasn’t worth spending the extra $20-30.
Zoom H1
– The H1 has actually been my personal recorder for a few years now.
And in quiet settings, like office rooms, I’m regularly amazed by the
quality recordings I get. It also happens to be idiot proof, with one
big red record button on the front, and that’s it. It’s virtually
impossible to not know when your recording, which I appreciate. Like the
Sony, it has a track marker for quick navigation to pertinent parts of
your recordings, auto-record, a low-cut filter and record level and
volume controls. Its one major downfall is that it picks up a ton of
noise. Even the slightest heavy breath or rush of air is enough to
produce distracting and occasionally voice-obscuring noise in the
recordings. I’m guessing part of this has to do with the X-Y mics, which
are fully exposed. You can get wind screens (and other accessories) for
the H1, but since it was already at my price limit, I opted not to
here.
Tascam DR-05
– Another more musically-oriented recorder, the DR-05 would be great
for recording yourself in a studio or quiet room—anywhere you can
minimize the potential for unwanted noise. Its backlit LCD screen—unlike
the AX412 and VN-702PC—displays dB levels for each mic and lets you use
the recorder in low-light settings.
Overall, the Tascam, which gives you the option of
recording at higher MP3 bit rates (320 kbps) and uncompressed WAV
formats, produced some really great sounding recordings as well,
providing the most realistic stereo reproductions of each individual
setting and rivaling both the H1 and WS-802. It’s great at recording
general ambience and would be great as a backup field recorder. That
strength also meant it picked up a lot of background noise and was
extremely sensitive to wind and handling and wasn’t as easily quashed
with low cut-filters. Add to that the fact that it was poor at isolating
voices when compared to the Sony or 802 and it was another pass.
Olympus VN-702PC
– If you’re resolutely against paying more than $50 for a recorder, the
702PC is probably your best bet, even though we’d definitely spend
another $20 to get our main pick. It didn’t have as many scene presets
as the competition. I also didn’t like the fact that you have to
navigate the menu system to change or alter any setting. You had to do
this to some extent in all the models, but the Sony, Tascam, and Zoom
all had dedicated buttons or sliders for things like noise cut/low cut
and playback speed.
It was also the only recorder I tested that had only one
mic. This didn’t affect clarity so much, but it did make it very
directional. If you didn’t point it directly at your sound source, there
was a good chance the resulting recording would be difficult to
understand. Sound, specifically voices, just didn’t sound as lifelike.
Like the Sony, however, the 702PC does come with a nice pouch and has a
built-in kickstand for an ideal recording position. At around $40, it’s
certainly nothing to scoff at.
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