Geoff from geoffmobile.com reviews the Sony ICD-SX712 recorder device, which is an amazing, tiny audio recorder that is ideal for recording live music, concerts, location audio / ambient sounds for films, dialog for film, lectures, meetings, making podcasts and personal voice notes.
It has two built in mics that can fold out to a wide stereo pattern (for great stereo imaging for a live band, for example) or fold in for a single direction (for recording an interview for example). It also has an external mic jack (stereo miniplug, powered) that can accommodate a mono lapel mic or a stereo mic. It has MP3 recording mode good for lectures or meetings. Also, for recording music or film work it has excellent uncompressed linear 44.1khz 16 bit wav recording mode, as well as manual recording gain, level monitoring, and headphone jack for monitoring a live recording or playback. Mastering these WAV files has given me excellent results!
Like other Sony devices, the sx712 has a “hold” lock switch that prevents the buttons from being activated while the unit is in your pocket. This is a really handy feature, and guarantees that once you start the unit recording and activate the lock, you won’t accidentally stop the recording by hitting a button.
The device can record on to its internal memory, or a micro SD card (slot on the side). i currently have an 8GB micro SD card on my unit, and this is more than enough for pretty much anyone! :)
My only issue with the unit (which is not that serious) is that the headphone gain does not go extremely loud at its maximum volume, which is fine for listening to mastered audio (as it also functions as an MP3 player), but for monitoring a live recording in manual gain mode, this makes it a bit harder to notice problems in the audio. Possibly this problem could be worked around with a headphone gain booster device.
Technical notes:
The audio of my voice for this video was recorded using the Sony ICD-SX712 using an external lapel mic. The audio was compressed (dynamic compression, not size compression) using a 2:1 compression ratio in Audacity and synced with the video using Pluraleyes from Singular Software. The camera used is a Canon EOS T2i (550d) using the kit lens 18-55 IS, manual white balance, Magic Lantern, Technicolor Cinestyle picture style. For this vlog, the EOS Utility was used to show the live view on my computer monitor from the camera so I could get focus. Edited with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 (legally licensed version, actually 5.5.2). In Premiere I applied RGB Curves to add contrast, and Three-way Color Corrector to add some blue tones to the shadows.
Thanks for watching!
See you next time,
Geoff
geoffmobile.com
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