First thoughts – Sony ICD-UX570 Voice Recorder
I was going to buy the PCM-A10, but this popped up and it was less than half the money. So I checked on Soundcloud to see if there were any recordings. There were a few, and, frankly, they sounded pretty good for what this unit is. $80, has a built-in battery and a slide-out USB plug for charging and transfer. It will take a micro SD card, and there didn’t seem to be any limit on size.
The ICD-UX570 is really small. It has 4gb of internal memory, which for 44.1khz/16bit wav is about 5 hours – the highest quality it will do. That’s not bad, but there’s the micro SD slot for more space if needed. 44.1’s still the standard for CD audio. If not planning to do a lot of extensive processing it’s regarded as good enough.
The levels can be set via menu, to three levels (low, medium, and high) and I and many others would’ve said that’s a joke. But I’ve come to change my mind. I rarely change the levels on my Zoom h1n, and rarely monitor, and have no issues. Having it in a menu just means I don’t have to mess with it. I need to test the auto mode to see how much it pumps, but so far so good.
The internal mics are ok. Not fantastic, but no one is buying this thing because of the quality of the internal mics. That said, they’re usable for my purposes, and I suspect if I recorded a podcast episode on this unit no one would complain. Or probably even notice. I would certainly hear a difference through headphones, and many folks would if they were listening critically, but for $80 and it slips in a pocket?
I have more testing to do but the external mic jack sounded pretty good in a casual test of the Deity w.Lav Pro dual head lav mics. I need to do a comparison with the PR-2 and the MixPre to really hear the differences, but I suspect they’re going to be smaller than one would expect.
It has pause-record – a feature I like, and names the files according to date, and has a built-in speaker. A lot of features in a very inexpensive package.
It’s early days, but so far I’m liking the unit more than I thought I would.
