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Review on 🎧 Enhance Your Audio Capturing Experience with Philips Voice Tracer DVT2000: Stereo Recording at its Best! by Jaleel Pruitt

Revainrating 1 out of 5

One of the worst! Avoid at all costs! (Philips DVT2000)

I've been buying voice recorders for at least 15 years. Audio was a bygone career and is still a hobby today. I have recorders from Sony, Tascam, Marantz, Alesis, iRiver and others including Philips. For a long time I thought Philips recorders were overpriced, but Revain is closing some stock and lowering prices enough to make Philips worth a shot. But the DVT2000 is scrap at ANY price. It is difficult or impossible to avoid recordings with severely distorted sound. There are only two microphone sensitivity settings: Low and High. First, I started my tests with low sensitivity. When the recorder was closer than about 8 inches from my mouth, or when I spoke louder than average conversational volume, the audio was distorted. This makes it absolutely unsuitable for recording in all conditions, even with moderate background noise. If you speak loud enough to be heard over background noise, it will be too loud for this device and the recording will be distorted. (It even sounds distorted if you're listening with headphones while recording.) If you're talking a little louder to someone across the room, the recording may become slightly distorted. It is only safe with soft voices in quiet situations. I also tried recording in my car at 60mph with a friend as a passenger. Of course at this speed there is a lot of noise from the road. We kept talking, speaking loud enough to hear each other over the street noise. The entire recording was garbled and useless. Knowing all of this, I tried setting the microphone sensitivity to high just to see what would happen. This increased (according to my testing) the gain by about 10 dB (equivalent to 10 times the power of sound). Now I could put a recorder on a dresser in one bedroom and then go to the other bedroom to speak and the mic picked up my voice pretty well. BUT when I then went back to the recorder and spoke in a normal voice, everything I said was distorted. For example, this might be appropriate for a student recording a lecture in class. But if the student (next to the recorder) then asked the professor a question, the question would be heavily distorted. IMHO there is no excuse for such poor design. People have known about distortion since the invention of amplifiers (over 100 years ago). and have known proper recording levels since the invention of electronic recording (over 75 years ago). That Philips did such a bad job and never seemed to test it in real life is totally unforgivable. DO NOT BUY THIS RECORDER! YOU ARE VERY APPROPRIATE. and have known proper recording levels since the invention of electronic recording (over 75 years ago). That Philips did such a bad job and never seemed to test it in real life is totally unforgivable. DO NOT BUY THIS RECORDER! YOU ARE VERY APPROPRIATE. and have known proper recording levels since the invention of electronic recording (over 75 years ago). That Philips did such a bad job and never seemed to test it in real life is totally unforgivable. DO NOT BUY THIS RECORDER! YOU ARE VERY APPROPRIATE.

Pros
  • MP3 stereo recording for crystal clear playback
Cons
  • boring packaging