I’m an English instructor at a university. I’d like to give students some listening practice by recording dialogues with advanced students (of course with their permission).
I have a small cassette recorder I brought from the States, but as it turns out the sound is awful. Lots of hissing and background noise, and if you get to close to the microphone, you get distortion.
Can anyone here recommend a recorder that has quality sound? Please let me know the brand name, as well as the price. Thank you!
Not many people are using tapes anymore so you should probably look at digital recorders. The Zoom H2 or Edirol HR09 are probably the best portable recorders available. Both of these have good microphones built in. Any digital recorder with an external microphone jack will probably do the job if you also purchase a decent microphone.
Sony makes a fancier one for about 50 grand but bang for your buck wise this Zoom is the best audio recorder you could ask for… Guy in our band uses one to record practice, gigs, his classes, random sounds, you name it and it’s awesome… Top quality true stereo audio, great preamp, multi track recording, variable playback, it does -48v phantom power for condenser mics although the onboard mics are great and it can act as an external USB sound card for your laptop… If your budget stretches as far as NT$10k this is definitely the recorder you want, it goes way beyond the H2…
Digital is def the way to go if you wanted to, you could post audio on your Moodle page or website for practice, discussion, etc, if you have that set up. Too much hassle to distribute this stuff from cassette!
I don’t have any specific recommendations because I always just used whatever my school had - not really high end, but it doesn’t really matter that much for spoken word recordings without a lot of background noise.
