Sony ICD-B300 Good Recorder for price

I purchased one of these voice recorders so that I would be able to listen to comments from people coming to view the house that we are selling. It has been very helpful letting us know what we may have overlooked when trying to sell the house. We just placed the recorder in a vase on the voice activated setting with High Sensitivity and High Quality settings.

The sound quality was very good. Although the mic seemed as though it may have been a bit too sensitive. Unfortunately it could not pick up what was going on upstairs. I could hear noises of people talking but could not understand the words. So we purchased another for upstairs. Recordings of the folks upstairs or downstairs from the respective recorders were very good on HQ level the low quality setting should only be used for brief notes or things getting recorded in close proximity.

The nice thing about this recorder is that you can see the time/date of the recording. You can also split files into separate ones. This is nice if you have a long file you want to delete portions of.

The main complaint I have is that batteries get used VERY quickly. If you use it as I do, leaving the voice activation on, high sens mic, high quality I will go through the batteries in a day. That includes a playback of the file that was recorded (about 4 hours of misc stuff during the day that it picked up).

I purchased some rechargeable batteries for this as we were going through the AAA's (it takes 2) pretty quickly.

On another note...another annoying thing is that when you replace the batteries you have to reset the time and date. Odd because the other settings remain but not too much of a problem.

If you were to use this as a student, reporter, someone who needs to remember things (or using it like I have) I would highly recommended.