Digital Audio Recorder. The latest technology of digital audio recorders explained. How they work, what they are used for and which one is right for you.

Audio digital recorders exist in 2 main forms, standalone recorders which consists of a separate unit attached to a tv or home theatre system. Or the more commercial digital audio recorder using a computer. The idea behind both types of recorder is to be able to record audio from whatever format you have say a cd, record, tape or dvd and to be able to record it onto another form of media or hard drive.

Personal Computers were first used to utilize the technology of a digital audio recorder, originally created for backing up audio cd's to a hard drive. There are many different ways to do this and applications to use. Windows XP comes with a built in windows media player, this can be used to copy tracks from a cd to your hard drive into a format called .WMA which stands for windows media audio. This format is very good quality and often a high bitrate of 160kb/s + and is similar to the .wav format which is an uncompressed format of audio which windows is able to recognise.

As mentioned the bitrate is a very important factor to consider when buying a digital audio recorder. A higher bitrate means better quality whilst a lower bitrate means the sound has been compressed more and so is of a lesser quality. The most popular form of compression for audio is .MP3 this stands for mpeg which is a type of media file used for both audio and video. .MP3 is the best compression method currently available because it is able to compress audio further with a smaller loss of quality. It is fully legal to record bought music etc in this way providing you own the original, however it is illegal to share it.

The second type of digital audio recorder is a standalone recorder. This works in a very similar way to a mini computer in a box the size of a dvd player. You could connect the digital audio recorder to your TV, home theatre system or Hi-Fi system using standard phono cables which could also be used to connect to an external amplifier. A standalone digital audio recorder basically has an internal hard drive and built in compression software. So when buying a standalone digital audio recorder it is important to check the size of the internal drive and method of compression it uses. sizes tend to vary from anything from 10gig to 300gig 1gigabyte being able to hold about 300 single audio tracks or 10 x 90 minutes movie audio, roughly depending on the compression method.

• Huge file editing: 4GB and beyond (NTFS only)
  
• High quality: 24 bit, 192kHz
  
• Real-time visuals: bar, waveform, spectrogram, spectrum, VU meter, ...
  
• Fast non-destructive editing. Cut, copy, delete, and undo take only a fraction of a second, regardless of the file size
  
• Supported file formats (wav, mp3, ogg, aiff, au, vox, mat, snd, voc, raw binary data, text data, and more)
  
• File format plug-ins for the next generation of audio compression, such as WMA, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC.
  
• Audio CD Reader
  
• Direct waveform editing with the mouse
  

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The Toshiba RDXS52 is a great example of an external digital audio recorder. It is capable of recording many different forms of media to its own internal 160 gig hard drive. Below are a list of some of its features.

• Records to DVD-RAM, DVD-R
  
• 160GB Hard Disc Drive (HDD) with Up to 135 Hours of Digital Record Time
  
• Plays DVD-Video, DVD, CD, CD-R/RW, VCD, DVD-R/RW, DVD-RAM
  
• Optical Digital Audio Output, 3 S-Video Inputs, 1 Outputs, RCA-Video Inputs
  
• 10-Bit, 54MHz Video D/A Converter
  
• 24-Bit, 192kHz Audio D/A Converter
  
• Auto Title/Chapter/Thumbnail Creation
  
• WMA & MP3 Playback
  
• High-Speed Dubbing from HDD with DVD-RAM (24x Max.) and DVD-R (32x Max.)
  
• JPEG Viewer, WMA and MP3 Playback
  
• Preset bit Rates for SP and LP Modes
  

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