My Radio Related Equipment: Sony ICD-PX440 Digital Dictation Machine

In my radio related equipment series, here is my Sony ICD-PX440 Digital Dictation Machine, aka a Dictophone.

 

It may not be immediately obvious in this day and age, but it is a very useful thing, however not for its original stated purpose as I have never used to record in a dictation mode.

I have other uses in mind for it.

First, for a radio hobbyist as myself, it would be useful to record radio reception which in theory can be done both using an audio in and a dictophone function via inbuilt microphone.

Again I have not yet used it for that particular purpose to date as it appears more expedient now to use your mobile phone in a video recording mode and you can also record the radio display indication.

Where it comes very useful indeed and has been used by myself exclusively and extensively, is to digitize past radio reception recordings that I have on a number of cassette tapes dating back to the 1990s.

It works great for this purpose but you to have to purchase separately a double ended audio in jack cable (or something) and I have a Belkin, shown on some of the pictures.

All my past radio reception recordings mentioned on this blog have been digitized using this little Sony device, and I general have been happy with it. 

Similarly, it solves the problem of digitizing your cassette tapes archives, including music, of course, and/or other programs.

Last but not least, you could use this machine to borrower songs off the internet that you like. 

But remember to do it strictly for personal use, of course.

For example, if you hear something nice and have the song name and title you can typically find it on Youtube for example, or on other sites that play the composition

Then you or whoever just plug this thing in an Audio out on the laptop and the record the culprit, the quality is usually pretty good, it records at 192 kbps (or something) which is CD quality I believe; and it's a lot safer than using various illegal downloaders.

 

Then you would use the USB connection on the device to transfer the sound file to the computer and then on to your mp3 player device.

And still another application I can think of and have actually used it for is to record my occasional Karaoke attempts, it's a bit cumbersome when used for that purpose but still works well.