Sony ICD-UX200 Digital Voice Recorder with Built-In Stereo Microphone (Silver)

I bought this specificaly to record individual conversations in a relatively noisy environment -- e.g. coffee shop, restaurant, with several people involved in the conversation. It worked very well for me by moving the device in front of the person talking -- in some cases the individual would pick it up and this of course worked even better. All in all, I am very pleased with the performance. I was able to produce a verbatum transcript at nearly 100% accuracy for all of the conversation I recorded over a 4 day period of time. I didn't test recording any musical performances.

With regard to construction and overall operation, I found it extremely easy to operate and to seamlessly download to my pc using the built in usb connector. I was able to playback all of the conversations directly on my computer and start and stop and replay at will to produce an accurate transcript. (You can of course play back directly from the device but I wanted to store it on my computer...Read more

I bought this for my nursing lectures, as there was just too much information to write down for my tastes! This little recorder works great!

STORAGE: Even on the best quality setting, I was able to record at least a week's worth of lectures around 2 hours each.
BATTERY LIFE: The battery life is really great too, I only charge it maybe once a week. If you have a laptop, you can charge it in class with the USB port.
FORMAT: The recordings are in mp3 format already, so you don't have to worry about converting it for other purposes.

Be careful which setting you choose.. out of the box it is set for the highest quality and you can easily have huge file sizes over 100MB. I recently set my quality a little lower and it still sounds just fine for my purposes.

I sit in a large lecture hall that seats over 100 students. I am usually in the middle rows, and the instructors use a portable microphone to speak. It picks up their information just...Read more

I searched around many places for a recorder to record lectures in class. I am so glad that I bought this recorder. I normally put the recorder up front, by the professor's desk, so the sound quality is great and the volume goes up pretty high when replaying the files. I love the fact that I can transfer files straight to my computer and that it is mac compatible without having to download additional software. It's a nice looking, compact recorder and, personally, I think it is a great buy.