I am helping a client prototype a new product which requires digital recording and playback functionality.
I’m assessing the possibility of using a high-quality digital voice recorder to serve as the heart of the system. Today, I bought two models (Sony ICD-P620 and Sony ICD-UX70) in order to see which would be the best fit for the application.
ICD-P620
ICD-UX70
The P620 lists at $59.99 and the UX70 at $99.99. Both have the basic features I need in order to control them with a microcontroller (Arduino in this case):
- Small form factor
- REC button
- (optional) light that recording or playback are occurring so the microcontroller can know when to return to the first track
- STOP button
- Track Forward and Track Back buttons to navigate between tracks
- Quickly advance between tracks
- Microphone input (so it will be possible to locate a mic away from the case)
- Headphone output (for use with an external amplifier)
- Internal speaker
- High Quality Recording
Both models rapidly change between tracks — and beep to provide auditory feedback that the change has happened. This may or may not be useful for my application.
The ICD-P620 does not sound very good, though. It is certainly possible to understand speech recorded into it, but the playback has some digital artifacts which lead me to believe it is probably encoding the files in an 8-bit format. I have decided not to use it for this reason.
The ICD-UX70, on the other hand, sounds pretty good. It records files natively in the .mp3 format (192kbps on high quality). Now, I’ll take the next step: disassembly (or tear-down, if you like).