The Recording Hours myth

There is a manliness test for digital voice recorders and it is how many hours they can record for. Some claim 139 hours, others 280 hours, still more the Herculean 573 hours. All these recorders have the same 1GB memory. What's the deal?

The answer, according to Graeme Pearson manager for Philips Speech Processing Asia-Pacific is: how painful do you wish to make your listening experience?

‘Listening to a very low bit rate is terrible for human ears. Not all the encoders are equal in terms of efficiency but generally speaking we do not enjoy the experience when the bit rate gets below 14 kbit/sec.’


140 hours should therefore be the absolute maximum recording time a 1GB voice recorder can handle. Any recorder claiming more than this is just being a bit cheeky.

Why buy a recorder when you could just use a mobile phone or an MP3 player?

The most logical analogy I can think of is the mobile phone vs. the digital camera: you can take photos on a phone but would you use one for your wedding photos? A digital voice recorder, like a digital camera, does one thing and does it well. Buttons are logically positioned, the microphone sensitivity and recording quality is adjustable and recordings can be downloaded easily without the need for proprietary software.

The fantastic new iPod Nano now has a voice recorder function. Handy for the quick reminder but a bit limiting for lecture or meeting recording. Why?

The Nano has one recording quality setting: 44.1 kHz, a sampling rate usually reserved for recording music, which means an hour of recording is about 60MB – not ideal for emailing or transcription (typing-up).