Customer Reviews

Sony ICD-SX57DR9 Digital Voice Recorder with Docking Station

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This model Sony comes either by itself for about $129, or $169 with docking station, recharable NiM batts.and Dragan Naturally ver. 9 speach to text SW. The Recorder is beutifully made, very small and records good quality Sony MSV files. However, both SW packages it comes with are a nightmare. I spent over 4 hours of personal time and an additioanl 1.5 hours with Sony technical support and NEVER got the Sony Digtial Voice SW to run properly. I tried it on two different Windows XP Computers. They do have a version for Vista now, you can download it from Sony (Ver. 3.1) However, neither 3.0 or 3.1 SW could run properly on my computers. I returned the unit in frustration. May try an Olympus, or just get a good o'l tape unit.

I've owned this recorder for several months. It does an excellent job on voice recordings, either for notes or for transcribing to written words. In contrast to the only other reviewer, the included software installed with no effort on my Windows XP Pro laptop.

Pros: Voice quality is truly excellent at "SP" mode or above. Many features including low and high recording sensitivity and voice activated recording mode. Includes two built-in microphones for stereo recording. Efficient recording modes make the best use of the 256M included memory. Supports and includes NiMH rechargeable batteries. Included Dragon Naturally Speaking software does an amazing job of converting dictation to speech.

Cons: Display is hard to read in some circumstances. Dragon software must be "trained" on a speaker's voice to get high accuracy. This prevents the Dragon software from transcribing conferences with more than one speaker -- it only does dictation from one speaker. File format is not mp3 or wma and the included Sony software must be used to convert it to other formats. (I doubt Mac owners will be able to use this product.)