Which (cheap) digital audio recorder works best?
Since moving to Los Angeles from New York a few years ago, the majority of writing assignments I’ve landed are, not surprisingly, celebrity profiles. I’ll meet up with an A-, B-, or C-list celeb at a loud cafe or raucous restaurant of her (or, more likely, her publicist’s) choosing. Throughout the interview, I’ll attempt to appear interested, while inwardly I’ll obsess that my little digital recorder isn’t managing to cut through the din to document her precious utterances—which later I’ll laboriously transcribe. Accidents do happen. Toward the end of documenting a daylong culinary odyssey with an Australian female twin pop-duo a few months ago, my recorder began flashing “Disk Error.” I tried not to panic. It was the final stop on our restaurant tour, and I resorted to the “memo record” function on my BlackBerry. Luckily, I salvaged the day’s recordings up till the glitch; and after countless rewinds, playbacks, and some painstaking tweaking of the bass, midrange, and treble, I was ab
