Q. What would be suitable for recording hypnotherapy sessions?

Could you advise me on an affordable portable solution to suit my needs?

Peter Michaels

Left to right: Edirol R09, M-Audio Microtrack and Zoom H4. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses, but all three of these portable recorders can give great results in almost any location. What's more, they all have USB connections, allowing you to quickly drag and drop audio onto your computer's desktop for editing. Left to right: Edirol R09, M-Audio Microtrack and Zoom H4. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses, but all three of these portable recorders can give great results in almost any location. What's more, they all have USB connections, allowing you to quickly drag and drop audio onto your computer's desktop for editing. Left to right: Edirol R09, M-Audio Microtrack and Zoom H4. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses, but all three of these portable recorders can give great results in almost any location. What's more, they all have USB connections, allowing you to quickly drag and drop audio onto your computer's desktop for editing.

Editor In Chief Paul White replies:

A lot depends on how many tracks you need. If you only need to make stereo recordings of live events or of speech, then the Zoom H4 (reviewed in SOS December 2006 and on-line at www.soundonsound.com/sos/dec06/articles/zoomh4.htm) would be ideal, as would the Edirol R09 (reviewed in SOS October 2006 and on-line at www.soundonsound.com/sos/ oct06/articles/edirolr09.htm) and M-Audio Microtrack (SOS March 2006 and www.soundonsound.com/sos/ mar06/articles/maudiomicrotrack.htm). All of these include a built-in mic, and because there are no moving parts, there's no motor or fan noise to pick up, as is the case with cassette-based machines or computers. Using a portable recorder's USB interface, you can transfer the recording to your computer for editing or further processing, allowing you to put it on CD using a regular CD-burning package. Most compact recorders of this type can record using the MP3 format, to make the most of the available memory and maximise the recording time available, although, providing you don't choose the more aggressive compression options, the subjective quality is actually very good and most people would be hard pushed to tell the difference on speech recording. Where non-compressed (PCM) recording is available, expect the recording time to drop to around a tenth of what you'd expect when recording in MP3 mode. 

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