Olympus DM‑770 Digital Voice Recorder

The media could not be loaded. I use this for recording my parts for all my various musical projects. The voice guidance is a great help to me.

The DM-770 is typically well-built, and is smaller than its predecessors. Crucially, for a blind person, it speaks almost all functions in the menus, if facility is switched on. (It is possible to activate/deactivate speech with one long button-press.It only uses one AAA battery, which makes it just about light enough to directly plug into a USB-A socket. Having a well-known battery type means it is much cheaper than replacing a fixed internal one, when needed.Recording quality is excellent, except with the 8-bit MP3 setting, where length triumphs over sound quality.There is a trade-off to having less power available: some of the old facilities, such as copying files and moving files, and the .WMA format, are absent. .PCM format is still with us, which is good. Also, the philosophy around Recording Scene settings has changed.All in all, a very good machine.

Only Olympus could pull this off, maybe Sony and Panasonic too. Brings back memories of the 80s, when our gear was crafted from metal, little use of plastic and designed to last. Superb tactile controls. Love the pop out USB connector! One thing I'm keen to find out though. Based on another review here, that implies there is a way to adjust the audio recording quality via bitrate, how do you do that? I have read the manual and been through every menu option. Cannot find a Recording Quality or Bitrate setting. Although I bought this for voice recording, be great to record some live music here at home, so better quality audio be great.

Writing this as a totally blind person, this recorder is the best I’ve ever owned. From the inbuilt sliding out USB port to the voice guidance and sound quality I’m really happy with it. I like how the buttons have indents specifically designed to help blind people as it says it the description. How the stop button is rough, the record is smooth. I had to get some sighted help to insert a Micro SD card as it was so small, but once I did it works really well. I have also just bought some 3D audio microphones, which also work brilliantly with it.One thing I have noticed about the DM770 is the ‘press ok to start charging’ message is spoke aloud, where as on the DM720 I also own it is not. Other than that, and the fact the 70 has 8GB and the 20 has 4, I can’t see any differences between them. Great recorder for what I use it for.