Sony Electronics  

One of the folks who have been at Sony Electronics longer than me is Stephen Teplansky, product manager for digital voice recorders in our Digital Imaging and Audio Division. And when it comes to this category of products, there is no one more expert than Steve, so I invited him to serve up the following guest post from our dealer Open House. Enjoy.

 Sony Electronics is making a really exciting move with our fast growing digital voice recorder category by introducing a great new line up of products for 2008.

We’re upgrading our highly successful entry level digital voice recorder (B500) and the PC compatible digital voice recorder (P520), which are both ranked in the top 3 best sellers in the industry. We doubled the recording time by changing the flash memory size from 256MB to 512MB, but at the same price. In the LP mode, the new B600 recorder provides up to 300 hours of recording time and the P620 recorder lets you record up to 260 hours. That’s more than enough for a week’s worth of classes or the most boring meetings. Adding a few minor design changes like increasing the size of the REC/PAUSE and the PLAY/STOP buttons makes it even easier to use. 

In the professional recording line-up, we have also doubled the flash memory size on the SX57 and SX57DR9 models from 256MB to 512MB introducing the units as the SX68 and the SX68DR9. The design of the product is identical. With the increased memory meaning the units can record up to 185 hours. What attracts users to these products is the great audio quality which makes it compatible with Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice to print software with which Sony has been so successful.

A good thing to know is these PC compatible products come with DVE 3.1.02 (that’s digital voice editor software) that is compatible with the Windows Vista operating system. FYI, for those folks who happen to have an earlier PC compatible DVR and have upgraded to a Vista PC, they can download this new DVE software for free on www.sony.com. The SX68DR9 includes DNS v9.5RE which is Vista compatible.

Now the big news. We’re introducing an exciting new line-up of direct connect voice recorders. For some of you that means you don’t need any software to transfer files to your PC. No USB cable, just plug it in to your PC. Your PC looks at the units as a drive so files can be easily drag’d n dropped.  This small and lightweight DUX series has some great features which set it apart from anything currently on the market, they are:

(1) Digital voice recorders
(2) Music recorders (record in stereo MP3 with the built-in mic)
(3) Mass storage Devices (UX70 with 1GB flash and UX80 with 2GB flash)
(4) PC and MAC compatible
(5) Come in a variety of colors like Silver, Pink, Red and Black

The recording time is great, up to 18 hours

The music student can record their practice sessions and easily transfer the files to their computer to make CD’s to turn in for class assignments or that critically important challenge of getting placement in a music program in college. And by the way they work great with music software like Sony’s Sound Forge Audio Studio software.

And to top it all off we’re even reducing the size of almost all the packaging for all the new digital voice recorders making them about 20% smaller. (For the environmentalist that means we’ve reduced the polystyrene material and paper content by about 30%. A great move for Sony and the earth.) Over all these digital voice recorders are great devices that can help anyone in more ways than one.