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Portable sound recorder

Started by Zetetic, August 12, 2021, 09:53:53 AM

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Zetetic

My partner wants to get a portable sound recorder for broadly two purposes:

1. We're going to see a family friend who is probably going to be dead in a matter of months, and my partner wants to record some conversations and the like with them (without dealing with a laptop).

2. My partner is getting into film making and wants the option of being able to record video and sound separately.

I think that ease-of-use for basic stuff and reliability are probably the most important requirements. She's thinking of getting a second-hand Zoom H4N and that seems pretty sensible to me if we can find one at a reasonable price - external batteries and SD card as the medium presumably mean the main points of failure are easily replaced?

But I've no insight whatsoever here, and I know there are people on CaB who live and breathe this stuff. Any thoughts?

touchingcloth

Those Zoom things are great. My partner has used them for stuff that's been on actual telly, though only like talking head/vox pop things where she was holding a camera with the recorder attached to it, and it wasn't howling a gale or in the middle of a warzone.

They're very well regarded by podcasters as well, or at least they were about 10 years ago when I cared about that sort of thing, because their built in mics sound great but the inputs let you attach external mics, including ones which need phantom power.

Have a look at the cost of replacement batteries if you're going second hand in case they're hugely proprietary and not easy to replace any more. SD cards are cheap and easy to replace, but it's worth looking into whether there's anything in a similar price and quality range which allows for recording to multiple cards at once, or alternatively think about cheap dictaphone type things or using voice notes on a phone as failsafes if she's going to make recordings likely to have sentimental value.

PlanktonSideburns

Zoom H4n is the biz, id get one of them

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Quote from: touchingcloth on August 12, 2021, 07:30:03 PM
Have a look at the cost of replacement batteries if you're going second hand in case they're hugely proprietary and not easy to replace any more.
They use normal AA batteries.

I came into possession of a Zoom H4n via work recently. It is good, although I don't have any point of comparison. It's intuitive enough that I learned to use it without ever being the instructions. It's one annoying quirk is that you have to press record twice to make it work - the first time switches on the mics, but doesn't start recording.

Milo

I'd recommend having a look at whatever Olympus ones are on CEX. There's a range of quality but there's almost always some very good cheap ones on there.

Elderly Sumo Prophecy

If you want to do the family friend thing on the cheap, you could just use a mobile phone. There'll be a sound recording app on it somewhere, or on the store.
There's probably even a way of plugging a mic into it somehow.

Zetetic

Mobile phone is probably useful backup if nothing else.

Thank you all - very grateful for the info and suggestions.

Noodle Lizard

Zoom is the gold standard, can't really go wrong with one of those, but there are some decent TASCAMs which are more affordable too. I don't have much first-hand experience with them, but they seem to do everything their Zoom counterparts do. If you're not attaching external mics, you could also look at some of the earlier Zoom models.

Hope this helps!