As office equipment goes, few devices have either the romance or the provocativeness of recording machines. Talking to H.R. Haldeman in the Oval Office in 1973, former US president Richard Nixon was recorded by his own machine as saying, "I always wondered about that taping equipment, but I'm damn glad we have it, aren't you?" He didn't remain glad for long. But what if he'd had a digital voice recorder instead of the bulky device bolted to the bottom of his desk? How might history have played out had he been able to scroll through recordings quickly and conveniently, deleting at the press of a button instead of searching through reels of tape archived in the White House basement?
Though his are the most notorious recordings, Nixon wasn't the first US president to bug his own office. In the summer of 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt invited inventor J. Ripey Kiel to drill holes in his desk through which he could run wires to a microphone hidden in the lamp on top.
Almost every other president since has had a similar set-up that was kept secret from the public and even White House guests. Hoover had one, as did Lyndon Johnson (who recorded over 92,000 hours of tape!) and Dwight Eisenhower. The pen-and-pencil set atop John F. Kennedy's desk also served as the switch to his recording system.
Recording machines have since gone through several incarnations; the dictaphone, the portable tape recorder and the mini cassette recorder, before arriving at the tiny and infinitely more usable devices we have today.
The advantage of today's machines comes as a result of their connectivity to your home computer. Not only can you store your recorded files on your hard-drive or create back-ups on CD, but with voice-recognition software you can automatically convert your dictation or conversations to text.
Although they aren't cheap, these devices aren't much more expensive than portable cassette recorders were when they first came on the market. You can spend from just under US$100 to US$500 or more for a device that -- as a co-worker who recently bought one said -- "it does everything except the cleaning up."
Olympus W-10
US$99.99
This little gadget, about 70g with the batteries in it, can only record for about three hours, which isn't much compared with other models. But, unlike most other models on the market, it can take a snapshot of whoever is speaking, automatically attaching the photo to its corresponding audio file when you download it onto your hard drive. It will take up to 250 photos, although at less than half a megapixel the pictures aren't clear when made bigger than a thumbnail. It allows you to store your recordings in one of two folders which you can then name. Nixon, for example, might have filed his conversations as either "impeachable" or "non-impeachable." You can also move those files between folders and delete single files or whole folders -- a feature "Tricky Dick" would have appreciated.
As with most devices made today, it has voice-activation to allow you to operate it largely hands-off, and can record 45 minutes of sound at 15.5 kHz (a high among models listed here), one hour and seven minutes at a standard-quality 10.3 kHz, or 3 hours of sound that you'll strain to hear for having been recorded at 3.9 kHz. The two AAA batteries that power it can be expected to last about 24 hours before running out when you need the device the most.
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