Olympus DS-40 Digital Voice Recorder by Olympus
|
Our Price: $304.95 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more digital camera details and other models |
|---|
Digital camera reviews of Olympus DS-40 Digital Voice Recorder
Digital camera Review: Easy to get great recordings at my church
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought DS-40 to record the sunday sermons on my church. It's a small church, so I figured a digital voice recorder will be enough and let me tell you that it is enough. Pastor wears the Olympus ME-15 Microphone (purchased separately) around his chest, then delievers the message as usual through another microphone which is connected directly to an amp.
After the service I get the recorder from the pastor, then copy the file to my computer, use Switch(ver 1.33) to convert the wma sermon file to mp3, and edit the file using Audacity to trim away any unwanted noise/beginning/end, adjust the volume. After that, my wife records the reading of the passages on the bible and the title of the sermon and I combine the two files and it's ready!
Recorded voice quality is very good!
Digital camera Review: Easy to use and good sound quality
Summary: 4 Stars
If you want an easy-to-use and reliable digital recorder, this one's for you. It took me 5 minutes to learn how to use it. The sound quality is excellent when recording multiple voices in a room. Over the phone, the sound was not as clear but perhaps I could have used a different setting. The disk space is generous, and you can organize recordings into separate file folders.Digital camera Review: Exactly what we needed
Summary: 5 Stars
I am director of a small Middle Eastern music and dance troupe. I needed a way to grab quick (but clear) recordings of the musician's rehearsals of new pieces so that the dancers could work with them on their own. This little recorder is just the ticket. Easy to use, clear recordings that are easy to transfer onto my PC. Very pleased.Digital camera Review: Excellent Device Ed Primeau-Primeau Productions Troy Michigan
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this unit for a client to record audio MP3 messages for his website. It is very easy to use and extremely high quality! I strongly recommend this unit as well as the lavalier microphone for live speech recording.
Ed Primeau
President/CEO
Primeau Productions/Troy Michigan
Digital camera Review: Excellent Sound Quality, maybe too sensitive
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought one of these so I could record our church choir and see what we needed to improve. I chose it over the Sony and other Olympus units due to superior audio specs and the capability of using external stereo microphones. I set it for stereo extra quality (STXQ) and placed it on the side wall near the choir before Mass. The next day I connected it to my Macintosh, dragged in the 95 MB file that it produced and opened with Amadeus II, a $25 audio editing software package. It had to go through a couple of conversions because the Olympus produces WMA, but 15 minutes later I had a 90-minute stereo audio file.
The sound quality with the included detachable stereo microphone exceeded my wildest expectation, and mind you that I am the choir's BASS player -- those tiny microphones reproduced my strings thumping away with no problem, and despite the fact that the physical separation is only a few centimeters, the recording "sounds like stereo".
One problem might be that the microphone gain cannot be set low enough. Based on some prior experiments, I decided to record on the least sensitive setting (DICT -- "dictation") and even then there were a few clips. Our church choir is, you know, a church choir, not very loud. For night-club level live music, you'd certainly get alot of clipping unless you switched on the automatic gain control. I have not tried it because of course AGC ruins the fidelity in some sense. Since the input impedance is specified, probably an electrical engineer could build an attenuator which would attenuate the audio while passing the piezoelectric bias, and such an attenuator could be interposed between the detatchable microphone and the recorder.
Also, it would have been nice if it produced MP3 rather than Microsoft WMA but, oh, well Windows users won't mind.
For you young folks -- You're so lucky! Thirty years ago recording with such quality required a dishwasher-sized Ampex ATR-700. This thing is amazing. Good work, Olympus.