Professional Duty Digital Voice Recorder.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Sound quality, device interface, battery life, integration to DragonSpeak dictation software.

Cons: Onboard speaker is weak, Sony PC software is adequate but has flaws.

The Bottom Line: 
This is a wonderful device for those who need a dictation device. It is full of useful features, easy to use, well designed and built.

Author's Review
The electronic control design for the device was well thought-out and is very effective, even for a power user. The battery life is very impressively long. The speaker is a little quiet so you will need to hold it to your head if you are playing back your recordings in a noisy environment such as the car. You may want to reconsider buying this device if you need to use the on-board speaker a lot.

The STSP (stereo short-play) playback is surprisingly high in sound quality and the stereo microphone on this device is very good. The directional microphone feature is VERY handy when going between personal dictation and the recording of meetings. There are very useful onboard features such as the VOR (Voice Operated Recording), Digital Voice-up, and DPC (Digital Pitch Control) and they work very well.

The Digital Voice Editor 2 PC computer software that comes with it is not stellar but it is quite good for the basic functions and not hard to learn. If you purchase the ICD-SX25VTP version, it comes with NaturallySpeaking's DragonSpeak Preferred version 8. The voice-to-text software is very good however you must be prepared to spend a significant amount of time (2-3 hours) to train it to your own vice. The integration between the Sony software and DragonSpeak is effective and has caused me no problems (unlike other Sony software I have used in the past). Remember that to train DragonSpeak you are going to need use a good-quality microphone on your computer; you are not able to train the voice-to-text software for your voice with just the use of your Digital Voice Recorder.