Olympus DS-40 Digital Voice Recorder

I purchased the Olympus DS-40 as an upgrade to my Olympus WS-320M. As mentioned by another reviewer, the DS-30/40 series improves upon the WS-300/310/320M series. I have owned a number of digital voice recorders from Voice-it to Sony and Olympus.

The DS-40 without its external microphone is about the same size as the WS-320M. It is slightly thicker and heavier. The exterior of the DS-40 is mostly metal. On the bottom, the battery door is plastic and hinged like the Olympus DS-4000. The mini-USB port is covered by a tethered plastic cover. On the lower right side, there is a power/hold slide switch. If you do not power the DS-40 off, it will enter a power save mode and the display will blank. Pressing a key brings it out of power save mode. The power save mode time is user adjustable. The control buttons are well spaced and shaped to make the DS-40 an acceptable dictation recorder unlike the WS-320M. The WS-320M has small flat closely spaced keys. The LCD screen is backlit in white and is very legible. The speaker is located in the back and produces enough volume to be heard in a moving car. On the top of the DS-40 is a stereo microphone jack which supports an optional remote control / microphone jack and is where the external stereo microphone is plugged in. Curiously, Nuance in their Dragon testing of the DS-30/40/50 writes that this recorder does not accept an external microphone.

The DS-40 is setup as a standard plug and play external USB drive. So you can transfer audio by using the supplied DSS Player software, Windows Explorer, or Windows Media Player. The USB audio transfer speed is about 140mb per minute. That is about five times faster than the WS-320M.

The DS-40 can be used as a digital voice recorder, a music player, an audiobook player, and a podcast player.

As a voice recorder, the DS-40 offers a lot of flexibility. With the three microphone sensitivies (dictation, conference, lecture), the DS-40 is suitable for handheld dictation (works best with the optional remote control), for meetings, for classroom / lecture hall use. I found the conference sensitivity adequate for a small to midsize classroom. As an aid for dictation, there is a voice activation option with 16 levels of sensitivity. You can adjust the activation level while recording from a barely audible whisper to a very loud trigger level. The voice activation feature along with the disable signal LED option are useful for surreptitious recording (check your local laws).

With the different recording quality modes, you can increase your recording time capacity by lowering the recording quality. I found the HQ mode (over 34 hours of record time) is quite sufficient for normal speech recording. The HQ frequency range is from 50 to 13000 Hz. The ST XQ mode produces very high quality recordings. Using an Olympus attenuator cable, I dubbed a recording from my IHP-120 music player to the DS-40 using line-out to dictation level. The sound quality of that dub was very satisfactory. There was a barely audible amount of added background noise in the recording. I think this is an excellent recorder for rehearsals, jam sessions, and practice. During my recording of a loud music presentation using the conference sensitivity, I noted that the recording levels went full bar and there was some slight distortion when the sound level was loudest.

As a music player, the DS-40 is just adequate. It plays music with a sound quality that is noise-free, warm, and full. Music navigation is by folder. There is no shuffle mode and no equalizer. The play mode allows single, folder, all, and repeat modes. However, the play mode applies equally to music, podcasts, and dictation. The WS-320M is a better music player. The DS-40 will play 320Kbps mp3s. The WS-320M will not.

As an audiobook player, the DS-40 will play audiobook content (after activation) from Audible.com in formats 2, 3, and 4. It supports Audible.com features such as bookmarking, fast and slow play, and book sections. It will also handle mp3, wma, and Netlibrary audiobooks with the useful features of resume position on a power cycle, fast/slow play speed (digitally corrected no chipmunk voices), fast forward / rewind over track gaps, and audible cue / review. The rewind over a track gap feature is important when a book is split over multiple tracks and you need to review a section you just listened to. If that section is near the end of the previous track, you would have a problem with Ipods and Zens. They both stop rewinding at the beginning of a track. There is no bookmarking with mp3 and wma tracks. You can set a temporary index mark with an mp3 or wma track. The mark goes away when you move to another track.

As a podcast player, the DS-40 will play podcasts loaded from the DSS Player software. You can add URLs to the player software to subscribe to podcasts. There are options to set the download interval, set delete options, and auto update the DS-40. As with audiobooks, you can use fast/slow play speeds and audible cue/review. There is no bookmarking feature. There is a temporary index mark feature.

In summary, this dictation voice recorder is excellent. It is well built, easy to use, and records very well.

Pros:

Small size, good price benefit ratio, long battery life, solid metal construction, standard mini-USB connector, large informative display, excellent quality voice recordings, voice activated recording with sixteen sensitivity levels, WMA codec, dictation capabilities, included external stereo microphone and input, date-time stamped recordings, plug and play for file/music transfers, and music/podcast player.

Cons:

No supplied carry case. Back placement of the speaker. No on-device editing capability except for delete and move.

FYI, there is a new series of Sony dictation recorders coming this year including the ICD-SX57. The SX57 is an upgrade over the SX46 with 256mb of memory, a backlit display, automatic record level and manual record level, three built-in microphones, an extra high quality stereo recording format, and record level display. A newer version of the Voice Editor software which converts to WAV and MP3 format is included to support podcasting.

I wasn't sure what to expect with this thing but I've been pleased thus far.

SOUND: Great quality, amazingly crystal clear sound in STXQ mode (highest setting). Stock stereo mic is actually pretty nice as well; I expected to have to buy another mic, but I don't know quite yet if that's necessary.

INTERFACE: Controls are a bit clumsy but a small price to pay for this quality, and given the extremely limited real estate on this tiny thing, I suppose they did a great job with design. It's plug and play so it's easy to use. It acts just like a jump drive for storage as well. Not to mention that I've been wearing this thing out and the batteries are still fully charged.

APPLICATION: I use it for lectures, business meetings, reminders, all the usual stuff. **HOWEVER, I actually bought it to try it out as a field recorder. I'm a musician and experimenting with sampling, and I've found that this is perfect for that. It was after all designed for podcasting. The specified field recorders out right now (Zoom H4, Edirol R9, etc.) have gotten tons of bad press; loud, clunky, low quality, etc., and there's no way I was going to buy an MD recorder. For less than half of the price of one of those, I bought this and the quality difference is unreal.

SHORTCOMINGS: Not many of these, but the big ones are the inability to rename files on the fly and the inability to resume a recording once stopped (you can do this if you simply pause the recording however but I'd like to be able to resume from a stopped or even powered `off' recording); it may do both of these, but I haven't figured it out yet. Also a problem is the fact that it doesn't come with a case of some sort. It's silver, metal and has a glass screen so I always feel like maybe it's going to get all scratched up. I'd also like removable memory option. For these small issues I've knocked it down to a 4 star rating; if there were a 4.5, I would have gone with that. If they came out with another that resolved all these small issues it would be worth another 25-40 bucks to me.

BOTTOM LINE: Truly outstanding bang for the buck. All in all, unbelievable sound (CD quality 44.1kz) and pretty easy to use. Good enough for a field recorder and no `tape' or hard drive ambient sounds.

Buy Olympus DS-40 Digital Voice Recorder Now

This recorder has excellent sound quality, impressive voice guided menu, easy to read display, great performance and key response, and is a great size and can conspicuously be put in your shirt pocket. It records to WMA files and can be plugged into your computer via USB as a USB drive. No software is even required to grab the files from it. It has a file system just like most digital cameras. The external speaker sounds quite good considering its size. The sound quality with headphones is fantastic. I didn't try it with music as there are much better things to listen to music with (i.e. iPod). The Music playback isn't a useful feature to me.

I first bought the Sony ICD-SX46VTP which had terrible sound quality and required software that complained of missing files during the install. I took it back in favor of the Olympus DS40 and I am really glad that I did. The Sony ICD-SX46VTP was terrible all around.

Read Best Reviews of Olympus DS-40 Digital Voice Recorder Here

I am very happy with this device which produces good quality recordings and is easy to use (didn't need to read the manual).

Here are a list of good and not-so-good points:

... Good bits ...

Very good sound quality. The supplied stereo mic (ME-53SH) does a great job and recordings sound very lively. I tend to use the middle sensitivity which gives great near-field recordings. The XQ quality setting sounds fine.

Good battery life. Using XQ (highest quality) I get nearly 8 hours of recording from a set of alkaline AAA cells. To save power I switch off the back-light because I hardly need it. I don't switch the device off, instead it goes into standby which means it is ready to use by pressing REC twice.

The supplied stereo mic is sufficiently directional to reject some ambient off-axis noise, giving better recordings.

I found the buttons quite usable, mostly you can operate the device without looking.

It is a very discrete unit tiny! I've even made good recordings while it sat in my shirt pocket. You can switch off the red recording LED if it is distracting during an interview.

... Not-so-good bits ...

The supplied stereo mic does not fit firmly onto the device it wobbles slightly. It is secured by a small jack plug in the middle and two small plastic locator pegs on the top of the unit. This means the mic doesn't feel firmly attached and isn't a robust connection. It is possibly subject to damage if mishandled. Perhaps this is why Olympus sell replacement mics for $25.

Olympus should supply a case for the device. I bought the $20 case (CS-113) which is expensive for a piece of felt but it protects the unit. The case also probably reduces some handling noise during recording.

The 256mb, 512mb and 1gb memory sizes are a fiction of marketing. At the time of writing you can buy a 4gb memory stick for $68 so there's no justification for the large price gap between the DS-30, DS-40 and DS-50 (which are otherwise identical apart from colour). I decided on the DS-40 which gives 8 hours at highest quality.

When recording, I can't find any way to review-then-continue, for example to replace something you just said. Tape dictaphones have done this for decades and it is feasible on a digital device, but not possible on this one!

... Other notes ...

There is no support for uncompressed WAV output, which would show what the device is really capable of in more serious settings. The DS-40 could capture nearly 1 hour of uncompressed audio. The XQ recording mode uses Microsoft's compressed WMA format and the standard editing tool on Windows is Movie Maker (not obvious) which again only outputs as WMA. Freeware tools like Audacity won't open WMA but you can solve this problem by using the dbPowerAmp Music Converter (free) and outputting as raw WAV, this produces large lossless files which you can edit in Audacity without further compression effects (add the LAME plug-in to make MP3s). I don't know what support exists for WMA on Mac.

Overall recommended.

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An update, 3 months later.

I'm still very happy with this device.

A couple of other points to add. The battery indicator is slightly confusing: after you've plugged the device into the computer via USB and then removed it, I found the battery indicator becomes inaccurate it shows more power than previously. The device doesn't do any kind of recharging so this is strange. Also, when the battery indicator drops to 1/3 (1 bar), change the cells if you want to avoid disappointment: I found the indicator doesn't mean you have 1/3rd of the battery power remaining!

On one occasion my device froze just like any good computer it locked up mid-recording. I removed the AAA's and it sorted itself out, no problems since.

I really recommend the soft case to protect it.

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An update, 1 year later.

This gadget gets regular (daily) use and it continues to be great. The sound quality on XQ is excellent.

Recently the device stopped recording in stereo so I unscrewed the plug-in stereo mic unit and found a tiny wire had become unsoldered: looked like a dry joint. I was able to repair this and now have stereo recording again!

While the stereo mic unit was open I noticed that the two internal mic capsules point outwards at 45 degrees, which explains how it captures such nice wide stereo sound. I would expect you could use this for recording music with good results.

For some reason the file counter reset itself to zero after about 1600 recordings, which was strange. But not a drama really.

Highly recommended.

Want Olympus DS-40 Digital Voice Recorder Discount?

SUMMARY:

Touching the unit while recording renders the internal mic and included stereo mic useless because of EXTREME handling noise, and the only way to fix this is to buy another mic that you will have to carry with you all the time.

DETAIL:

The other reviews adequately highlight this product's strong points, however there is one HUGE problem, in my opinion, and that is that if you touch the recorder or the table it's on while it's recording using it's own mic or the plug-in stereo mic that comes with it you will hear EVERY little touch or bump, even the tiniest ones. It is horribly bad in Lecture and Conference modes but also a problem in Dictation mode. If you are recording by setting the unit on a table you will not be touching, it will do fine. If, however, you want to hold the unit while recording (for example if you are dictating or doing an interview or walking while using it) or set it on a table at a coffee shop or the kitchen table while you're having a meal or even just resting your arms on the table you will NOT get a good recording; the voice quality is wonderful, but the internal mic is so sensitive that you will also hear when your thumb moves lightly across the unit even a few millimeters. I'm not exaggerating, I actually tested this by recording and lightly touching the unit, then lightly touching the table and when I say lightly I mean lowering my hand slowly until my finger makes contact with the table with as little force as possible and it picked up EVERYTHING.

BOTTOM LINE:

If you buy this recorder and want a recording clear of handling noise, the internal mic and stereo mic it comes with are USELESS, and you WILL need to purchase another mic with a cord that you can use with the unit. This is, in my opinion, a HUGE drawback for this price.

Why does my 10-year-old micro cassette recorder not have this problem but now these new digital recorders do? That is so frustrating. If any of you knows of a digital recorder that doesn't have this handling noise problem PLEASE TELL ME!