Home > Consumer Reviews > RCA RP5120 256MB USB 104 Hour Recording Digital Voice Recorder

The system won't allow me to upgrade the star rating - too bad. My initial review was negative. I thought the recorder had too low sensitivity for lecture recording. Later I read the manual more carefully, and found a CONF setting. Now it records in open spaces loud and clear! I recommend this unit, ignore the star rating I gave it earlier.

Of course there are other units of better quality and flexibility of use. However, if one is on a budget and just needs a recorder for the requirements of the job or school, RCA's product is adequate.

The pluses are the price, the compatability of the unit, the very informative manual, and the fact that there are four "folders" in which one can place his recordings.

On the minus side, the volume setting could be stronger but a decent set of headphones will assist in hearing that which has been previously recorded. The unit devours regular AAA batteries. Because of the latter, an investment in rechargeable ones might be advisable.

I liked the price and the size. Easy to use but when it came time to listen to the lecture I got frustrated at the ability to rew and ff. The unit was too slow and if I hit the rew twice the unit erased where I was at and started from the beggining...ARRGH. Sounds good and has great pc download speed which is what I had to do to get my lecture in a place to use for my needs. Price good for what it delivers but could be the ultimate if the speeds were more flexible. 1x 2x 10x.

This is an easy to use voice recorder, but if you're looking for quality, go with an Olympus. The sound quality of the playback is horrible, both on the player itself and the computer. Hoever, if you need a recorder just for grocery lists or lectures, this will do.

This recorder, I thought, was a decent interim recorder for only a few days while my Olympus was down and another en route. My mistake! I successfully converted three files to the .wav format needed for my purposes. The fourth file I attempted to convert was considerably larger, 27,000+KB, and I got an error message, "bad file format." What? It's the same format as before! Tech support informed me that the file was corrupted because it was too large and there was no other way to access it. There should definitely be a warning in the instructions that if you record more than an hour at a time (mine was one to two hours in length) it will corrupt the file. Had I known, I would have stopped recording and created new files throughout. Now there's no wayt to transcribe what was recorded and it's lost forever. What a bad, bad investment! I didn't get mine from Amazon, but people should know about this. Mine is going back to the store where I purchased it. It's a piece of junk for lengthy recording.