Portable Sound Recorder?

Question

I'm looking for a high-quality portable digital audio recorder in the $100-500 range. I'd like to be able to hook it up to an external microphone and download the audio directly to a computer as an mp3 or wma file. My primary interest is good sound quality with little background noise. Any suggestions are appreciated.

Answer 1

The Gemini iKey kind of suits your needs. The basic model records to USB memory devices in MP3 or WAV, but only has line-level phono jack inputs. There's an enhanced version, the iKEY Plus that costs a bunch more, which does have mic input and better metering.

However, the only display is a handful of LEDs, which limits how much info can be displayed. Also, reports are that the units don't actually meet the published specs: there's some low-level digital noise in the recordings (down around -70 dB). There's no provision for playing back or monitoring the recording. The basic iKEY is cheap enough to consider anyway, but for around the same price as the Plus you can get an MP3 player that also records in high quality.

There's open source software for certain MP3 players which allows recording in various formats: Rockbox http://www.rockbox.org/
Check the list of supported players to see which ones support recording.