The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds
65%

Olympus LS-10 Linear PCM recorder

Can dictation devices do music?

  • print
  • alert

Review Olympus has quite a pedigree in the compact, tapeless voice recorder market, yet the introduction of the LS-10 Linear PCM is a distinct departure from all this.

While both types of recorder share the ability to easily transfer audio files to computer over USB, the LS-10 takes itself very seriously, proffering uncompressed audio recording at different sample rates and resolutions, up to 96kHz at 24-bit. To emphasise its semi-pro pretensions, two sizeable microphones, 90° apart, stick out of the top like teddybear ears and are channelled through much higher quality analog circuitry than its cheaper voice-oriented siblings.

Olympus LS-10

Olympus' LS-10: built-in stereo pick-ups

The device itself is roughly the size of a cordless phone, has a metal casing and comes equipped with two foam windshields - mufflers for those ears - a carry case, strap, USB and audio cables, but - surprisingly, considering it’s also an MP3/WMA player - no headphones. Even some cheap, crappy ones would come in handy but, given that underneath the LS-10 there are two tiny, tinny speakers, Olympus, no doubt, assumes this is sufficient for monitoring needs.

Powered by two AA cells lasting up to 16 hours and featuring a 2GB internal memory, the LS-10 can record over 68 hours of audio in low-fi WMA 64Kb/s mode and, at the other end of the spectrum, 96kHz/24-bit WAV which will las a mere 55 minutes. All in stereo, of course, but if there were a mono mode - and why not? - you could double those times again.

All is not lost, though. On the left side of the unit below the earphone jack socket and the volume control is an SDHC card slot, which accommodates capacities from 512MB to 8GB, giving a maximum recording time of around eleven-and-a-half days, which should be enough for most guitar solos.

Latest Comments
Anonymous Coward

@ FLAC Flack

What - more processing required than encoding to MP3 or (especially) WMA?

0
0

FLAC Flack

The amount of CPU power required to do real-time FLAC processing would flatten the batteries unfeasibly quickly.

0
0

What these devices need...

...is some bundled software that transcribes your dictation. Unless I'm missing something none of them do?

0
0
Anonymous Coward

FLAC

With its pretensions for quality, why on earth doesn't it have FLAC? Same as uncompressed .wav, but approx. three times the capacity!

0
0

Recording your entire life

I'd like to record daily life for a few weeks, for fun and profit (no profit, actually), but these things seem to need their batteries changing after only a few hours. Are there similar devices whose charge will last days or weeks?

0
0

More from The Register

Is the next-gen console war already One?
Microsoft’s new Xbox - and more
 breaking news
Apple cored: Samsung sells 10 million Galaxy S4 in a month
Beware of South Koreans bearing Android
US boffin builds 32-way Raspberry Pi cluster
Beowulf cluster built for the price of a single PC
STROKE this mouse to make apps POP, says Microsoft
Windows 8 Start button comes to Redmond's rodents
Nintendo throws flaming legal barrel at YouTubing fans
All your walk-through vid revenue are belong to us
Fairphone goes on sale to all
The Android handset that's PC can be yours

Hands on with Hyper-V 3.0 and virtual machine movement

Our award-winning Regcasts have teamed up with training provider QA for the deepest of deep dives into Hyper-V, including a live demo.

Understand VM movement - just click to play, or go here for a bigger version.