The skinny on the shirt pocket

A slim and sleek little gadget that slides neatly into a pocket, the Sony ICDTX50 is the perfect digital voice recorder for personal and professional use.

At just 6.4mm thick and a tiny 102.3mm x 40.8mm, it features an LED display seamlessly integrated on the front panel and has an LED operation indicator that tells you that a voice file is being recorded or played back.

The TX50 comes with a clip allowing you to attach the recorder to your shirt or blouse pocket. It also provides a scene environment recording setting to allow you to get optimal quality for those times when it’s attached to your clothing.

The TX50 has 4 gigabytes internal memory, allowing it to store up to 178 hours of MP3 recording in MP3 48 kbps mono mode. It also TX50 has a slot for a microSD card to add more storage.

Particularly impressive is the TX50’s has battery life. Its rechargeable lithiumion battery can provide up to 24 hours of life on full charge. Best of all, it has a quick charge feature, allowing you to do 60minute recording on just three minutes of charge. You can recharge it through a USB port of a desktop or notebook computer. The package provides a USB cable for recharging and transferring recorded files to a computer without any wall charge though you can of course use the USB wall charge of other smart phones with the TX50.

It has two microphones located on top for stereo recording. The microphones have three sensitivity settings – high, medium and low. Proper choice of microphone sensitivity and a noise reducing function called Low Cut Filter (LCF) can help minimise noise from the recorded audio. The Low Cut Filter function is designed to reduce noise from a projector or roaring nose from wind.

During the test, I tried recording with medium microphone sensitivity and the LCF function turned on and found that the recorded voice quality was good – low and clear with little noise.

In the playback options, the TX50 comes with seven equalizer settings – two of which are designed to reduce noise from recorded voice files. And because of these good equalizer settings, the TX50 can also function as a good quality MP3 player. Sony provides a pair of stereo earphones for the recorder, which can also be used for monitoring the recording.

The TX50 is quite intuitive to use after you have consulted the manual as to which buttons to use. You’ll find the stop and record/pause buttons on the front panel and several other buttons on the two sides for playing back or skipping forward or rewinding recorded files. The playback button and forward and backward buttons are also used for controlling menus and changing settings of the recorder.

The TX50 comes with four preset recording settings. Each setting is called scene. The four scenes are Shirt Pocket, Meeting, Voice Notes and Interview. It allows you to adjust setting of your own scene by choosing record mode, mic sensitivity and LCF option.

Using the recorded files on your computer couldn’t be simpler. Just drag and drop them to your computer or use the provided Sony Sound Organizer software to do the task.

Sony ICDTX50 retails for Bt5,990.

        

Key specs

_ Recording Features: 5 Modes: Linear PCM / LPCM (44.1kHz, 16bit): Noncompressed HighQuality stereo mode SHQ (44.1kHz, 192kbps): Super High Quality stereo mode HQ (44.1kHz, 128kbps): HighQuality stereo mode SP (44.1kHz, 48kbps): Standard Play monaural mode

_ Recording Media: BuiltIn Flash Memory 4GB and Memory Card Expansion Slot (microSD) 

_ Recording and Playback Times: LPCM 44.1k 6H, MP3 192k: 44H 40M, MP3 128k: 67H 5M, MP3 48k (Mono): 178H

_ Audio Format(s) Supported: MP3 files: Bit Rate: 32 kbps 320 kbps, WMA files: Bit Rate: 

32 kbps  192 kbps

_ Dimensions: 40.8x102.3x6.4 mm

_ Weight: 50 g