PHILIPSDVT7500 VoiceTracer Audio Recorder

I've been using this for a few months now with an XLR mic and I have no idea why they discontinued it. It had already been dropped by Philips when I bought it, but I took a chance based on the low price. I am in no way displease with my decision. I use it for YouTube voiceovers and love the quality of audio it captures. I am impressed by this recorder. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for its manual (online). Some things I just had to figure out by myself, but it wasn't difficult. By no means does it have a steep learning curve. Anyone can use this device, most assuredly.

I used this product for professional field audio recordings until now.The unit has some quirks. For example, the WAV recordings can only be saved on the onboard storage. Only recordings in mp3 format can be saved on the SD card. One has also to be careful with the sensitivity level when recording. It is very easy to have clipping on the recording, due to an input level being too high. The fine tuning of the input level is difficult and is very sensitive. Another quirk is that using the auto gain will force the recording into mono instead of stereo. The interface is good although not really user friendly.It has external XLR inputs with Phantom power (48V). I did not use this feature much since most of my recordings were field recordings but it does work well.Although it is a recorder principally designed for speech recording, it was also thought as an audio professional field recorder and does the job very well as such. It is a bit heavy but it is a real sturdy construction compared to the cheap plastic cases of the competition.The bad part if that the support service is bad or non-existent. This unit has now been discontinued and is sold by third party vendors not by Philips. It is a bit expensive compared to the competition. If purchasing it, be very careful when connecting the USB port.I stopped using this unit now as the mini USB connector started to break lose from the main board. I opened up the unit and found out that the soldering was getting loose (bad soldering at manufacturing time). It is a micro soldering which makes it very difficult if not impossible to re-solder the connector the motherboard. Ultimately, the connector totally broke loose from the board. It is too bad as this unis is simply of a very good audio quality. The microphones especially are quite good, compared to my replacement Tascam unit.

Only a 3, as it was a third party seller from Amazon (was trying out the used model). But it had all the functions I needed, look great, was portable, very clear recording. XLR’s was a big buying point for me. Unfortunately, it didn’t work properly (flash drive issues).

The Philips DVT7500 VoiceTracer Audio Recorder produces very good recordings using the built-in microphones, and also allows you to use external mikes, including XLR (using the provided adapter) for more flexible placement, and line-level inputs such as an electric guitar or keyboard. You can even use both the internal mikes and the external inputs devices simultaneously. The format of the recording can be set everywhere from 128kbps mp3 (suitable for voice recording) to 24bit/96kHz WAV (uncompressed). Keep in mind that if you wish to record to external media (up to 64 GB micro SD-card), you can only use the 128kbps mp3 format, so this is really meant for recording meetings, lectures, or situations where very high quality musical reproduction is not important. However, even at the highest quality, there is something like 8 hours of recording time available on the internal memory, so this limitation should not generally be a problem.The design of the unit is good overall, although there are a few peculiarities. For instance, there is a dedicated Noise Cut switch, presumably for speech recording, where if activated, the recording is mono-only, and the quality is severely reduced. Nowhere are these restrictions mentioned in the User Manual (supplied on the device; you'll need to copy it to a computer to read), and I initially had a terrible time trying to figure out why the device was seemingly not accepting my recording settings with regard to format, etc. Also, it is surprising that the Noise Cut is the sole setting which is not relegated to the Quality Settings along with the other recording parameters.One other peculiarity I noticed is that, after having set the microphone Gain, when returning to the recording screen, the Gain adjustment will not have been set. You apparently have to press the Focus button to activate it.All of these things the user can get used to, and the DVT7500 makes fine recordings, but I recommend making many trial recordings just to become familiar with the various quirks in the software design. Were these idiosyncrasies not present, this device would rate 5 stars