As we are getting ready for
our move, I am moving things
around. Yup.
In the confusion: I lost several
things.
A) A ton of rechargable batteries
I use every day.
B) My homemade carrier current
coupler. (Sheesh, how did I manage that??)
C) A really good and INEXPENSIVE SONY handheld solid state
voice recorder.
Items A and B HAVE to be in one particular
room. There is no way they could have been taken
out of there. They must be buried in a stack of stuff.
But I'm bummed out about losing the SONY voice
recorder. It is a teeny handheld unit you would expect
to see if a person was recording a lecture, or a business
person was recording dictation. It runs on 2 AAA batteries.
But (unknown to almost everybody)
it has jacks for stereo headphones, and plays back
in stereo. And it has a jack for a stereo microphone.
You can attenuate the input and record very HIFI
STEREO line in audio, with a few audio adapters. It sounds
GREAT when played back through a stereo system.
It was only $49.95 a few years ago, and has since
been discontinued. There is nowhere on the box or
in the instruction manual that even mentions that
this little marvel can record and playback HIFI stereo.
It's almost as if it was a mistake or maybe it was
overlooked or thought to be unimportant by the
marketing people. This recorder is a GEM. Especially
for the low price. It did everything I needed.
I apologize, because I know we have talked about
this before. But does anybody have an item like this
that is currently being manufactured?
Last week, in (sort of) desperation, I took a chance
and plunked down $30 for an almost identical unit
which is made by another company. It's not stereo,
it's MONO. It takes a line input with some
adaptors, and has great fidelity. But again, it's
not stereo.
The thing is, after decades of using analog audio
recording equipment, (and I have no computer)
a little unit like this is a marvel to me. To a guy
my age, it's just a technilogical miracle.
Sorry about the spelling errors, but one of
the dogs had to go out in the middle of the
night here, and I just decided to type this.
I have to go back to sleep.
What do you guys think? I'm looking to
buy a similar unit. (Money doesn't grow on
trees around here.)
This little handheld unit could have fallen
out of my pocket anywhere.
Has anybody ever found and bought a
similar unit?
Bruce, DOGRADIO
Bruce,
I have a Sony ICD PX312 which has features as you describe. The built in microphone is mono but there is a jack for an optional stereo microphone. I purchased it about 9 months ago at WalMart but I just did a web search on the model number and they are available for $50 at Amazon. They advise there is a limited quantity available so maybe they have discontinued it but for now they are still available.
Neil
Or, you could buy a second MONO unit and simply use one for left channel and the other for right channel.
Well, thanks Neil. That sounds just
like what the doctor ordered.
By the way, in a failed experiment
a while back - I tried to patch in
an external power source for one
of these little recorders. If I ever
try it again - I will use a voltage
regulator and current limiting.
Even 2 D batteries was too much.
I thought I could make the recorder
run a lot longer with those external
batteries. That's not what happened
though. There was just too much energy.
So instead of more recording time, I just
got: Zorrrrrch. But as we both know - that's
not really the way it is. With that kind of
unit - it just sits there dead, and doesn't
do anything. And at that point, it slowly
occured to me that I had messed up.
Thanks again,
Bruce, DOGRADIO
About a million years ago, or so it seems,
my brother went to an air show in Rhode Island
to see the NAVY jet flyers - The Blue Angels.
He wanted to record the crowd noise and the
sound of the jets flying past. That was with
a mono cassette recorder. He had a second mono cassette
recorder recording the communications frequency.
This was all very silly because later on - he tried to play
both tapes back at the same time and get sync between
the noise on the ground and the jet to jet air coms.
Both cassette machines had been running on batteries.
Both were low end analog machines.
He was never ever able to sync the two
playback sources up. At some point
they would always drift out of sync.
It drove him crazy for a long time.
The year after that - he got one
tape recorder and a battery powered
mixer to combine the air chatter and
the crowd noise. That worked.
Goofy stuff.
Bruce. DOGRADIO
Carl, I suppose you could use
two mono units, but you would have
have to figure out how to start and
stop them at the same time. The stereo
separation would be really really great.
And Neil, I took a look at your Sony unit
on the net. It is almost identical in appearance
to my lost unit. The only difference is that
my unit is silver, and there is no removable
SD card.
They are really great, though, I think.
It's a long way from trying to record the
audio from Gilligan's Island on my 3 inch
rim drive Lafayette battery powered tape recorder
back in 1965.
"Skipper! Skipper!" - "What is it little buddy?"
And before you could heard the skipper's answer,
the speed would change (really bad wow and flutter)
and the rest would be unlistenable.
Bruce, DOGRADIO
As always, MICRODOGSTUDIO tends to inspire me to think beyond the limits of thinkness.
Let's be clear.
So called stereo is what?
I'll tell you what.
It's the left and the right.
But how realistic is that?
Stand there again.
Now look up, down, front and back. None of those locations are either right or left.
REAL stereophonic sound would need to be at least six channel!
In 1967, when I got my first reel to reel
tape deck, we came upon an absolutely
hilarious stereo demonstation record. It was
33 and a third - you know - an LP. Oh, I
mean hilarious by today's standards. It was
upbeat, but serious THEN - because it was
supposed to show people (who otherwise didn't
know) what stereo sounded like. But if you
listen to it NOW in 2013, it just sounds like
nothing, basically, just a whole bunk of odds
and ends in one speaker, and a bunch of other
junk in the other one.
It started out something like, "Audio Fidelity Records
Presents!..." And then some dude went on to explain
how cool stereo is. (Don't get me wrong, I agree - but
because this was relatively new technology at the time - it was
all overdone.) I remember this comedy routine somewhere
in there (Cartoons in Stereo?) where some guy forgets to
close the hatch in a submarine, and everybody gets buried
in water bubbling sounds. There were audio sinewave sweeps,
classical music on the left channel, and dixieland music on the
right, and all kinds of other funny things. My friends and I were
just 12 years old at the time - so it was - WoW!
Really great then, just a yawn today.
Those sure were good times, though.
Bruce, DOGRADIO
If a railroad train is arriving from the left, you want it to pass through your apartment to the right and fade to the distance, poor speaker placement can cause train derailment which can wreck all the furniture.
This is not funny.
You should see my kitchen chairs.