Good Sound. Useful Features.

The Olympus DS-2 has good sound, lots of features, and is solidly built. It has 64 meg of built-in memory. The sound is adequate for most needs. The interface is a bit tedious, and the WMA file format is not as convenient as wav or mp3 would have been.

As a musician, teacher and composer, I wanted a portable recording device that would be suitable for capturing ideas, notes, rehearsals, etc. with a better quality than typical voice-recorders. The DS-2 delivers this.

The DS-2 has 5 record modes providing a range of record qualities. The highest quality setting allows for about an hour of stereo recording. Unfortunately, the DS-2 doesn't offer a mono mode of comparable quality. The other modes, 1 stereo and 3 mono are the typical low-quality data-compressed audio typical of other voice-recorders.

In the its best setting the sound is good. The spectrum goes from about 100Hz to about 15K. Moderate level sounds are accurately captured and sound decent, comparable to the built-in audio i/o of a computer.

The DS-2 has two mic sensitivity settings: "Dictation" and "Conference" (Low and High respectively). The mic input jack is at mic level so connecting a line level source drives the input fairly hard. While in record the DS-2 displays 16 segment level meter in the display. It is a useful, responsive meter.

There is auto-limiting which makes loud audio sound compressed (I'm talking about dynamic audio compression, not data compression). While the auto-compression prevents clipping (distortion), it does color what you are recording. The release of the compressor is fairly quick, so you don't have that annoying slow ramp up of volume of older auto-limiters. While I prefer being able to set the level of input, for the price, having the limiter will mostly be helpful.

The headphone out is positioned on the side which defeats its slim profile somewhat. The volume control is a double "+/-" digital volume control. The downside of that is that if you want a very quiet level, you may find that the level you want is inbetween the available settings. For this reason I bought a cheap little in-line headphone volume control from radioshack.

Even though the built-in speaker is the typical tiny, chirpy, dynamic coil type; it's very useful to have a speaker built-in and I'm glad it was included.

The user-interface is a bit cumbersome. The logic and positioning of the buttons makes even basic tasks tedious especially when the unit is in it's leather sleeve. That said, there are a large number of cool features that make the unit versatile enough to handle the recording tasks of the day. The DS-2 has included some skip ahead/back, and index functions that make finding your way around a longer recording easier.

The display has an excellent back-light which makes the display easy to read in the dark. The light goes out after ten-seconds of no-button-activity. When the back-light is off, the display is difficult to read in all but the brightest rooms. That said, if you need to read it, press some buttons.

The DS-2 has many useful features which you can read about on Olympus's website. Here's a list of most of them...

* one high-quality stereo record mode
* noise reduction for playback
* listen at a higher playback speed
* five namable folders for storage
* voice activated recording
* use as storage device
* scheduled record function
* alarm/reminder function
* plays WMA & DSS files
* helpful FF & REW functions
* large display

There is a main menu and a sub-menu. Settings are made in there.

The DS-2 comes with a good manual (in several languages), some nice earbud headphones, a leather holster, and a USB cable and cradle (the cradle is not needed to connect to the computer).

I did attach the USB to my Mac computer and it appeared on the desktop as an untitled drive. Files (of any type) are easily moved to & fro. The unit also comes with some software that adds some functionality.

One minor gripe is that the audio file format for the high quality audio is WMA. And for Mac it is difficult to generate files in the WMA format to transfer to the DS-2 for portable listening. WAV or MP3 would have been more convenient. WMA files made by the DS-2 and accessed via USB, play normally in the Windows Media Player®.

The carrying case (holster) has small holes where the speaker is, but covered the sound too much, so I cut out a larger hole to reveal the entire speaker. Also, this case tends to make some of the buttons a little less convenient to press.

My DS-2 tends to go through batteries fairly quickly. Two fully-charged NiMH batteries (AAA) last for about 12 hours of use.

I have never tried Sony's MZ-M10 mini-disc recorder, but I expect it might be a good choice for the next step up from this.

There you have it, my dizzyingly detailed review. I hope this was helpful for your purchasing decision.