£10.99 Digital Voice Recorder Tests

Testing a digital voice recorder I bought on eBay for £10.99 (about $14). What do you think of the sound quality?

Thrunite TC15 links:

PS: buy a TC15 on Amazon and leave your honest review on it with a free Ti 3 as a gift.

[DaedalusYoung]

9:12 Audio doesn't work like that. The quality depends on two things: bitrate and sample rate. Bitrate is how many bits you use per sample. Usual numbers for this are 16 bit for CD audio and 24 bit for higher quality audio. The higher this number, the more dynamic range your audio has. Sample rate is how many samples per second you take. Typical numbers here are 44.1 kHz for CD audio and 48 kHz for high quality. This directly determines the highest possible frequency the audio can contain, the theoretical highest frequency you can have on a CD is 22.05 kHz. Of course for really high quality, you could go for 48 bit, 88.2 kHz, but since human hearing is pretty much limited at 20 kHz (and lower as you get older or have your car stereo full blast all the time (I hope you read this, neighbour)), you don't really need this, unless you want to do some serious audio editing.

Now to calculate, to have a decent audio quality, you'll want to have 16 bit @ 44.1 kHz audio, which means you take a 16 bit sample 44, 100 times per second, so you'll need a bandwidth of 705.6 kbits/s per channel. If the recorder is recording at 384 kbits, then that's either recording at 16 bit @ 24 kHz or 8 bit @ 48 kHz. Either way, not very high. If it's 24 kHz, it might be enough for voice recordings, but you'd still be missing out on higher pitches, such as s or f sounds (which I think is audible in this example). If it's 8 bit, you'd have a 'grainier' sound, more compressed than what you'd expect. I don't hear that, so I will assume what you get out of this recorder is 16 bit audio with a sample rate of 24 kHz. I'd say good enough for your vocoder project, but not for any serious audio recording.

[MauricioTaslik]

I have one of these recorders since 2016 and I have been using it to ocassionally record lessons in a classroom. I have always noticed there was something like small failures (like discontinuities of 1 second every now and then) in these recordings but never minded until trying to use it to record some audio to provide a decent alternative to internal mics on video cameras (since the quality is quite good). In HQ settings my recorder presents a failure around 3:15 minutes, it's like it misses a second of recording. Remarkably when recording at the lowest quality the same kind of failure appears much earlier. I somebody can check this out with his recorder...

[IvanVoras]

I think that someone in China has developed a chip(set) for DVRs and companies are massively using it in their own devices. I bought a $16 device which has EXACTLY the same characteristics, down to also having 2 microphones while recording mono, having exactly the same buttons, and the "press any button to turn on the light" feature, a telephone passthrough, a recording which is clipping, but in a completely different different case with a completely different screen.

[gcewing]

Seems to me creating a fake animated VU meter would be nearly as much work as making a real one. It's almost as if the manufacturer is deliberately trolling people.

[michelegabb]

Do you know a way to "reset" the recorder? I have no display and was hoping there was a way to reset it and maybe get the display to appear.

[webchimp]

Considering how much light comes out of the right mic cover from the LED I seriously doubt there's actually a microphone in there.

[Mike_]

Love the important notice at 1:40 but it seems a bit back to front !!

[Legenda]

I have a $15 Tivdio V-115 FM/AM/SW radio that has record capability and I'm blown away at quality from line in
Records to mp3 @ 192/44.1 on SHQ

[balsai.is.anapus]

Is it good for EVPs? or for ghost hunting?

[gartmorn]

The high quality sound setting is quite acceptable for a tenner. Handy tool for interviews etc on a tight budget.

[MartynDavies]

I'm sure the Zoom will be much better. I used the H4 for a while, and got good results from it. The Tascam DR-05 is a nice unit also.

[tomgeorge]

Hi Julian, the comparison of audio by superposition was not really showing how different the quality was.
Can you play say 5 or 10 seconds of quality audio, then play the same 5 to 10 seconds of recorded audio, so we can hear the difference.

[LaurieBenjamin]

Mine has stopped connecting to the pc for transfer. I do get the option when I am in play back mode but still not recognized

[zsombor_]

Well, what a surprise! (I got this video totally randomly in recommendations.)
I have one of this recorder for few years now (only difference is mine is brown) and my experience is:
1, Battery life is excellent! I can use it for a long time before it needs to recharge.
2, Built in microphones are not the"best", really easy to overdrive them (get distorsion), so I always use an external microphone (just simply an electret microphone on a mono jack)!
3, Storage usage is really good! Now it contains all recordings since I got it and the used space is still under 1 GB out of the total 4 GB!
4, It actually can record in stereo, too (I not tried it yet). Look for an option like "HQ REC" or "Fine REC" in "Record type" menu.
5, User interface translation is not the best, it really feels like Google translate... :/
6, I not recommend the included microphone! It's cheap as possible. Mine was not built properly, I was unable to get any sound with it (if I remember correctly), so I "get rid of it" pretty quickly.
7, File transfer is really easy! Just connect it to a PC and the built in storage just shows up as a USB drive.
Conclusion: it's cheap, but actually quite useable. :)

[TheTimeProphet]

I also have one of these, but there is a problem with mine. If I set the date and time, it doesn't save it in the filename and also when you turn off the machine it resets itself to default 2014 year. It is infuriating.

[kaineswiftblade]

is there any way to transfer the recordings to a computer? I am hookinh it up to my PC and can't find a single way to do it

[coondogtheman]

If you plug in a line level device that's outputting stereo audio and record it on this recorder is it in stereo?

[sergueimayen]

Can recordings be downloaded to a pc or something of the sorts?

[DustinWatts]

Hi Julian! You could split the signal coming out of the vocoder in to a powered speaker and in to the line-in on your PC.

[ticaudittrail]

Is it possible to monitor sound as it is being recorded using earphone or headphones?