Sony M-560V Microcassette Voice Recorder

I bought this about three years ago and it is great. I can use it to record school lectures and it picks up everything real nice. Unless you listen to what you recorded with headphones or some other external speaker you will hear a lot of background noise. Once you put on headphones though all background noise is gone and the voice comes through clear. I have even used this to record my kids complaining about homework l so I could play it back for them later and have proof of what they said. The kids don't like it but as a perent it is a good tool. As a student it is a good tool too. The only thing that I don't like about it is having all thes little tapes laying around, if there was a way to download the conversations on a disk it would make things easier.

Records mostly noise of the motor. Poor sensitivity and poor recording quality. My 5 years old (and stolen...) Sony recorder
was perfect. This one is useless.

I've had mine for three or four years now. I've used it for taking notes as well as recording meetings, and it's good at both. It's small enough that it doesn't draw attention to itself.

Now, it's not a supersensitive spy recorder; you're not going to record a quiet coversation across the room. But that's not what it was meant for. It's best for recoding voices within 6-10 feet, although in a pinch it will record (somewhat noisily) from twice that distance. Add an external microphone and you can increase that range. Add an inexpensive telephone pickup and you can record your incoming phone calls, too. Use the VOR function and you can record them automatically.

Microcassette recorders are somewhat a dying breed, as digital recorders and flash memory cards plummet in price. But it'll still be a while before you can get a digital voice recorder that can record 90 minutes as cheaply as you can with a microcassette recorder.

This model records noise instead of voice. I just returned it to Circuit City.

I bought this recorder to record a class I was taking. Lukily for me, my instructor had a loud voice so it recorded well. It has two speed selections. If you use the slower speed to get more tape time,it will get worse. It also has the V O R "high" "Low" selection and that's only to ensure continuous tape play when the voice gets soft. If your instructors voice is soft it may not work to well.

I've seen other Sony models that are better and they take a regular cassette tape not these microcassette tapes.