MD

[Esther H Kim]

Just thought I'd throw in that my experience with MD has been very good.
I've used DAT and cannot tell the difference in sound quality. But then
again, I haven't sat down to compare the two side-by-side, and I don't do
a lot of phonetics or music.

I use my Sharp 702 portable MD recorder (paid $265 in Jan'99) primarily
for recording naturally occurring conversations, and with a Sony ECM-909a
mic, it has been great for that purpose (as Robert mentioned). The
recorder is so small and light, and the discs are very easy to handle; I
take it almost everywhere I go. I've also used MD for recording
elicitation sessions trying to trying to listen for tone in a Tibetan
language, and the MD held up fine for that (we were in a quiet room with a
good mic, directly into which the informant spoke).

I really like that I can determine the length of a track and name it, and
that I can move these tracks around. So if say, the first 10 minutes of
the disc is useless, I can edit it out, move it to the end of the disc and
have that extra 10 minutes to record something else.

Other than recording, it's been a great teaching/presentation tool. It's
easy to play and replay tracks for a class/audience. It takes no time to
find the right track and you don't have to rewind to just the right spot.

I should also add that I've been digitizing MD to hard drive in 1 step w/o
a problem.

Esther Kim
Linguistics
UC Santa Barbara


--
Esther Kim
ekim at umail.ucsb.edu