The latest music digital recorder from Olympus is now available in Australia, the Olympus LS-3 comes hot on the heels of the demise of its predecessors the LS-10 and LS-11 and puts its hand up as the sole recorder in the current Olympus Australia range aimed at recording music.
So what makes the LS-3 different to any other recorder in the Olympus range? Well all the other Olympus recorders are designed to record spoken audio which generally has a constant and narrow range of audio volume. Large fluctuations in volume, very quiet to very loud are not coped with well with standard voice recorders, this is where the LS-3 steps in. Not only that but the new Tresmic 3 mic system nestled under the LS-3 mic grill is designed to pick up a more natural, closer to reality audio.
Audio levels on the LS-3 can be controlled automatically or if you prefer manually. When setting levels manually a built-in limiter will suppress any sound distortion.
The neatest feature of the LS-3 though has to be the pre-record function. Advertised to let you “Never Miss A Beat” this handy featured when turned on will hold a 2 second audio buffer, so as soon as you hit record the previous two seconds of audio has already been recorded and now included in the audio recording.
Key features of the LS-3 are:
- Records in Linear PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) WAV, MP3 or WMA audio formats
- 3 Tresmic Mics, center mic can be turned on or off to give a frequency response of 20Hz-20kHz (Center mic ON) or 70Hz-20kHz (Center mic OFF)
- 4Gb of built-in flash memory with an additional microSD card slot for expansion upto 32Gb
- Mac & Windows compatible
Released in Australia in August 2011 for RRP $299 incl. GST, the LS-3 sets a new standard in music and nature sound recording.