Sony ICDUX70 Digital Voice Recorder MP3 Stereo Recording and Playback

I have had been using the Sony MZM200 Professional Portable Hi MD Recorder for the past year for digital recording of meetings and lectures. I have had good luck with it but I could never just hand it off to someone else to use. So I began to look at flash based recorders. The model I kept coming back to was the ICD-U70 but I was concerned by the proprietary file format and the difficulty that I had heard about converting it to a more standard format.

Well, with the ICD-UX70 & UX80 this major concern was addressed as the file format used is MP3. Now I can just load it directly to my computer and then to the website for podcasting with no transfer or conversion. I usually do some cleaning or normalizing using Nero but - oh how easy this has become. With the ease of this unit, I can imagine that I might not be using my MD recorder nearly as much.

I have used the unit connected to a sound board, an external microphone (Sony ECM-CS10 Tie-Clip-Style and Sony...Read more

I purchased the ICDUX70 last week. Unfortunately, I wanted it fast and paid $99 at Fry's. (By comparison, the ICDUX80 was $149 (for 2GB) and I thought I could live without the extra Gb of memory).

My initial purchase excuse was to record voice conversations and classroom lectures as well as listen to prerecorded audio recordings, but after reading the documentation it looks equally well suited for dictation or music when used with an external (higher quality) mic or other audio input with excellent audio (see one possibility below). Is reportedly compatible with, but does not include, Dragon Naturally Speaking (I have not tested however).

The use of (the nearly universal) MP3 format is a huge plus (although an open source codec such as Ogg Vorbis might have been nice in some ways). The ICDUX70 records directly to the internal memory which can be easily read and written to by any computer that has USB just like a flash card (Sony only advertises...Read more

I've been a heavy user of digital voice recorders in the past for noting down ideas when I'm in bed (and the lights are out -- no paper), and for when I'm driving. I don't use it for much else, but when I do use it, I tend to use it a lot.

I started out with Sony, then went to Olympus, and now I'm back to Sony again.

This little unit is my favorite so far. Transferring sound to my Mac couldn't possibly be easier. The size and weight are the best yet, as is the recording length.

Where I ding this little marvel is in a few areas: The buttons are too tiny, and too similar. The first Sony I use had a large and square record button, compared to small round buttons for everything else. Based on everything I've used so far, this is the "right" design; why Sony used all tiny round buttons for the UX70 I'll never know, but it forces me to check and recheck myself to see which buttons I'm really pushing.

Battery life is absolutely...Read more