i recently had the pleasure of owning the sony pcm d50 digital recorder. i bought it in order to record the sounds of NZ. birds, blowholes, space, sea.
it was excellent to use, with simple, well designed controls. the twisting dials for volume and recording levels are superb. the display is informative and uncluttered and the extras, like limiters etc are on hard switches so easily accessed.

recording quality is excellent. low noise, good response, missing a bit on bass. very sensitive. it can record sounds i can’t even hear…

i never did, but you can plug in a mini jack equipped external mic and provide it with plug in, but not phantom, power.

it makes a great mp3 player, won’t play wma files, and has a tendency to have its own recording folders wiped when you plug it into a pc with wmp. ouch.

it doesn’t have xlr jacks, more than 2 channels or a wind shield as standard, and that SUCKS, as it is so sensitive, that even the hint of a wind sounds horrible.

also, you can’t plug it into a pc and use it as an audio interface, but only access its storage, and you can’t do anything else with it while that is happening.

it does come with 4gb of memory built in, and a slot for more.

its also a TOUGH cookie. i dropped mine, from 8ft, onto concrete. the roll bars over the mics just got a minor ding, and the sturdy case was solid. it worked fine afterwards too, thank god.

another good thing was that it turns on reasonably quickly, so if something is going down, you can get it recording in 10 – 15s or so.

well. i sold it, basically because i fancied 4 channel recording, and something that would double as a skype device, and something that came with a windshield. so i got the zoom h4n instead.

the zoom h4n is much slower to turn on. achingly so. 30 + seconds with a 16gb card in, slow with a 1gb. i’m not sure about sound quality yet. there’s not hard switches for limiting etc, and the display is bad in comparison. i miss the recording level dial already, but the auto level feature is pretty good. its fab to be able to listen to recordings on the onboard speaker, so i don’t have to pack headphones, and the thing comes with a wind shield, although its a dense foam thing, and it won’t fit into the supplied hard case, so its easily lost. i’m disappointed that the 4ch only works with the 2 xlr jacks and either the built in, or 3.5mm external. i was hoping to use it with 3.5mm binaurals and the built in. recordings as and when i come across an interesting sound.

uploaded is a mp3 convert of a recording with the sony

closeupblowhole