Product Reviews

Many MP3 players can record as well as play tracks, but if you're serious about it you need a dedicated voice recorder. Sony's ICD-UX80 is a stereo recorder that's also an MP3 player.

The neat design is shared with Sony's UX70, which has 1GB of memory rather than 2GB and comes in black or pink, while the UX80 is black or silver. You remove a cap on the end to reveal a USB plug, and the whole unit plugs into your PC to transfer files. If you replace the supplied AAA battery with a rechargeable, it'll charge when the UX80 is plugged in. Despite the small screen, the simple interface is easy to use. Music and recordings are displayed in a list of files and folders which you navigate using

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a joystick. Recording and playback buttons are self-explanatory.

With a microphone on each side, the UX80 supports stereo recording. This is very useful when recording a conversation, as the two microphones should pick up two people talking at once without one blocking out the other. At the lowest quality settings you can fit up to 581 hours of audio on the internal 2GB flash memory, but the quality is poor. Audio files recorded at the highest setting sound very clear, and there's still room for 145 hours. The internal microphones are fine for recording interviews for transcription, but if you want to record audio for broadcast you'll need to plug in an external mic. The recorder can increase or decrease the speed of a recoding without changing the pitch of voices, which is ideal for transcription.

The ICD-UX80 is also a simple MP3 player. It supports ID3 tags, so it can display artist and song name information, but can't sort files by artist or album, so you'll need to make sure your music is organised into folders before you copy it across. You may want to replace the supplied headphones, as they're uncomfortable and lack bass.

Sony's ICD-UX80 is an easy to use and well designed voice recorder and a fair MP3 player, and is reasonably good value.