ERI LA Socio-Political Blog

If you’ve ever seen those celebrity match-ups with Superman vs Batman and the like, digital telephone recorders vs cassette telephone recorders will sound familiar. If not, you’re about to see a non-celebrity match-up of two recording devices. Not the most exciting lineup, but Cher and Madonna were unavailable.

Recording Time:
In our first contest, we’ll compare the recording capacity of a cassette vs digital phone call recorders. It’s a knockout for digital, which can hold dozens or hundreds of conversations. Cassette, on the other hand, staggers under two hours of conversation on a 120-minute cassette (60 minutes per side).

Duplication:
Ouch. Need to copy a cassette? First, very carefully preserve your master, and record only from the master. Copies of a copy will sound horrible, and the master will wear with time. Digital copies? No problem. Duplicate the original file endlessly with no loss of quality.

Sound Quality: You may not notice much difference in the quality between cassette and digital, actually. The cassette may leave a slight hiss on the recording, but some cassette recorders have pretty good quality. Let’s call this one a draw.

Size: If you need to carry your cassette phone call recorder, get a microcassette, which is the smallest available. On the other hand, you could go digital and get a recorder the size of a cigarette lighter. Oooh. Another one to the digital side, though admittedly size is probably not a huge factor for most people.

Archiving: This is the knockout round for digital. If you’re planning to archive your cassette recordings, you should set aside a lot of room for the tapes. Archiving digital files is simply a matter of setting up a new folder on your computer. Pow.

It looks like the match goes to the digital telephone recorders. Seriously, if you are currently using a cassette recorder and want a lateral transfer, that’s fine, but if you’re upgrading, you’ll want to switch to digital for a number of reasons.