I admire how you are so stubbornly recording your entire lives. I reckon it can really give so much useful information that you’ve missed during the intial encounter.

Kudos to you both.

I use a Yamaha C24, which is probably the tiniest decent quality recorder there is, even smaller than this one, and it gets about 24 hours of continuous MP3 recording with just one AAA battery. I thought that this new Sony recorder could be a higher quality replacement, with a similar form factor and the advantage of selectable stereo mic pattern, but from the audio samples I’ve heard so far I’m not impressed, it sounds stangely muffled, unnatural.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XI3maSTDHM

As for recordings disappearing when the power goes out unexpectedly : with my Yamaha C24 it happened a few times, for WAV recordings they just stayed there as idle space (when checking the Properties of the volume, the free space is less than what it should be, the difference corresponding to the “ghost” recording), just making a CHKDSK on Windows’ CMD command prompt would allow to recover them (in a hidden folder called FOUND.000). For MP3 recordings it’s trickier : if the recording is not finalized it remains considered as free space, and gets overwritten as soon as you record something else, but, if you know your ways with an hexadecimal editor it’s possible to get it back if you do it right away. I can’t explain the process here in depth, and it might differ slightly with another recorder, but you might find a tutorial somewhere. I gave detailed explanations on this forum thread, but it’s in french (pseudonym “idiosyncrazy”) :
https://fr.audiofanzine.com/enregistreur-poche/zoom/H4/forums/t.358653,recuperer-fichier-mp3-quot-0-octet-quot,p.2.html
(By the way the Zoom H2n has a built-in data recovery function for those situations.)

To me, a guy who basically records my entire life, just beacuse… this is a major leap forward (Bluetooth and cell phone control, for example). I would NEVER have considered this some kind of replacement for those field recorders, because it IS a voice recorder.

I’m surprised you made that connection, actually. Their voice recorders have been around, gradually improving in quality and features, since at least the early 2000’s. In January of 2001, I bought my first ICD-MS1 (which was mono) as a replacement for my microcassette recorder. That was followed by the ICD-BM1, which was more of a medical dictation device and even came with Dragon voice recognition software, the ICD-MX20 (a venerable device and the first stereo one!), the ICD-SX750 (that one didn’t last long), and I’ve been using the SX1000 since then. This was the first one to have a built-in rechargeable battery. All the previous ones took regular AAA batteries. For years I kept 15-minute rechargeable batteries and charged them every single day to keep the recorders running. Now, I just plug the SX1000 into my computer every night (that’s the one downside, you can’t just put fresh batteries in it, but you CAN plug it into a small USB backup charger, so it’s not all bad).

I wear these propped inside the hem of my pants on the left side with the mics out, face-in to preserve directionality. My friends all know I am recording my life 24/7 and lean over and speak into the recorder sometimes. I call it “Digital Buddy” because it means I can talk to myself without being completely insane because it’s being recorded… by my digital buddy, who is always listening. The way I relate to it, I’m talking to some listener 500 years from now who will get to hear the daily goings-on of a 20th-/21st-century geek.

This all evolved out of a desire to leave more than a hyphen between two dates on my tombstone. I want future grave-site visitors to be able to call up audio from any day of my life since the late 1990’s, which is what I have recorded. Yes, I have well over 20 years of my daily life recorded! Crazy, right??? :-)

So the review is somewhat off in that this was never intended to be a replacement for field recorders. It is yet the latest iteration of a LONG line of voice recorders… a damn good one that CAN be pressed into service as a field recorder in a pinch! I use it to record live bands, choirs, jet engines… you name it. It can handle it all. I’ve never been concerned about noise floor because it’s just my daily recorder… NOT a proper field recorder. You can even plug it into a mixing board and get dead-solid sound! It’s great B-roll audio, I’ll give you that!!

That being said… I’m about to buy one. I still can’t believe I didn’t know it was out. Are you sure about the plastic? My SX1000 is aluminum and looks like brushed aluminum in places instead of black-painted aluminum because of how I wear it under a belt every day for years.

These things are VERY durable, too. I can’t tell you how many times I have dropped this onto concrete and it keeps going with amazing audio! The one serious issue I have with these that has changed in recent years… they don’t do well when it gets TOO hot and sweaty. They will shut off sometimes in the middle of recording and then you will have lost everything since the last time you started recording. NOT COOL!!! I don’t know why they can’t fix that. I’ve complained about it enough. Why should you lose everything just because it powered off while recording??? It should still be there, right? But then that same thing can happen with hard drive multi-track recorders when they lose power, too, so who knows??? Surely the audio industry can figure out a solution to that, right? That’s one area where TAPE kicks solid state digital recording’s a$$!!!!

Also, it used to be that you could just hit a button to start a new file, and that was how I defended against losing data in the event of a shutoff… just hit that button every now and then when it was hot (I roller skate!) and you start a new file. Now you have to turn stop and start recording again to get a new file. They let you place markers, but NOT new files!!!! What a stupid thing to do!

Anyway, I could go on forever. I’m digressing here. The point is, these little recorders totally kick A$$, but don’t compare them to proper field recorders. That’s never been their intended purpose, though they CAN be used that way where noise floor isn’t your primary concern.

Its too noisy and too expensive.