Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones
Customer Ratings
Based on 78 reviews
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Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones
Half The Time Device Doesn't Record
Written by CB from RANCHO SANTA MARGARITA
Aug 7, 2009
We have had this item for about a year and around 40%-50% of the time it doesn't record you just hear static. Very disappointed... but when it does record it sounds great.
3 of 4 people found this useful
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Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones
Drains the power
Written by EC
Aug 28, 2007
Tried to use this for lectures. It drains the battery so badly I am unable to tape 3 hour class. Voice quality is fine, just doesn't last.
30 of 41 people found this useful
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Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones
OK with 8G Nano
Written by DA from Oakland
Mar 26, 2007
almost got 4 stars...
-Good sound for the size of the mic
-Super easy interface
-Nice shortcut button on mic
-low quality recording setting stores ~30 min of sound in ~80mb (better than I thought)
-Stereo function works well
Nitpicky Issues:
-No Dock connector on bottom of mic to power while recording. ( yes, it has the USB connection for power, but now I gotta have ANOTHER cable?!)
-Autogain button clunks around a bit when you turn mic side to side. (The mic DOES pick up that sound)
-Can't monitor recording quality while recording (no feature to do this, and, it blocks the headphone jack on the Nano anyway)
Why did I not give it 4 stars?
-Froze my nano after plugging and unplugging a few times. There was another review reporting a similar problem. doing the reboot thing (Holding down menu and select button for 6 sec) 'fixed' it, but I'm a little frustrated that this happened. Hey Belkin! Give the people a firmware fix for this thing to keep it from freezing. (and allow monitoring)
I'm going to keep it, because it performs a valuable function, but I'm warning my friends before they buy.24 of 27 people found this useful
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Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones
Broken!
Written by CP from Clawson
Mar 2, 2007
This product worked great, really. My previous experience with recorders for the iPod weren't all that great, and this was way better. Then it just stopped working. I didn't drop it, or throw it, or bang it. It just stopped working. My iPod Video doesn't even recognize when it's plugged in. It's like it stopped existing.
17 of 27 people found this useful
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Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones
Tune talk works. iPod recording suffers half second dropouts every 2 min.
Written by GC from New City
Dec 20, 2006
In all fairness the Belkin works fine. It is the iPod 30Gb, however that lets me down. While recording, everytime the hard drive spins up (to write record buffer) there is a gap of half a second. It eats words and for live music it is unusable. I read on forums that reformatting might help. I tried another suggestion which was to use a defragmenting utility to leave the iPod with a 2,5 Gbyte contiguous free block. This didn't help as my test recordings still skip. Apple need to update firmware to compensate for disk spinups and dropouts.Until then, I would hold off on buying any recording device.
43 of 48 people found this useful
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Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones
Sound quality is ok, but bad design!!
Written by SR from Edison
Dec 6, 2006
How can one design a product without the ability to charge it using the the mains? The least they could have done is put the ipod charging interface instead of a regular USB port, considering the microphone uses so much of battery power.
I guess a third party needs to make a charger for IPod using the USB interface as apple won't make it and looks like belkin is incapable of making it.17 of 37 people found this useful
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Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones
Not impressed
Written by SF from Somerville
Aug 23, 2006
Adding this device to your ipod really sucks up the battery power. They do warn of this in their brief instructions. No speaker bummer--I should have read the information better. I had to force restart my ipod because I couldn't shut it down as a result of plugging it into the ipod. One good thing--the sound quality is good although, the recording range is questionable. My advice, try another product for your ipod or get a Dictaphone. I'm a student--I could have really made use of this--lesson learned.
51 of 74 people found this useful
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Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones
Excellent quality, but totally unacceptable HDD noise
Written by MN from El Cajon
Aug 2, 2006
Overall the Belkin TuneTalk Stereo records excellent sound. I use mine for linguistic analysis of spoken languages.
Unfortunately, about 20 seconds into recording, the iPod HDD starts spinning, and the whir and click of the HDD are picked up by the "excellent" microphone, and render this product unusable. It then starts and stops spinning about every 20 seconds (I use the 5G 30gb).
PROS: excellent sound, line in, small, stereo recording, external power capability, fits iPods in cases, comes with power cable and stand (although kinda tacky).
CONS: horrible HDD sound interference, no built-in speaker for playback - imo, 2 very big cons.
Conclusion: if you want to use this mic to record information, but don't care about quality, it will work. If you care about the actual sound of the recording you're taking, steer clear. I could even hear the HDD during a recording of me playing guitar. My question is, why bother recording 44kHz stereo wav files if you don't care about the sound quality?
The only solution I can see is to buy a male/female dock extension cable so that the mic can be on a cable separate from the iPod. As useful as such a cable would be to many people (e.g., docking iPod without having to remove it from case, putting accessories like FM transmitters in convenient places while maintaining access to iPod), none exists (www.sendstation.com claims to have one in the making). Hopefully waiting for this cable isn't anything like waiting for a mic for the 5Gs....110 of 120 people found this useful
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Belkin TuneTalk Stereo Microphones
Hard Disk Noise (and Ugly)
Written by JF from Washington
Jul 27, 2006
This is one of three high quality audio recorders that are or soon will be available for the 5G iPod video: Belkin Tunetalk, Griffin iTalk Pro, and Xtrememac Micromemo. The best reviews, as always, are at iLounge.
The Belkin and the Griffin both have built-in stereo microphones. The stereo is useless and built-in means hard disk noise on the recording. Also the Belkin and Griffin lack speakers, and the Belkin has too many buttons and is just bug-eyed ugly.
The Belkin has two unique features. First, it can be used when the iPod is in a case (at least a Belkin case, and probably most others) – a big advantage. Second, the Belkin has a mini-USB port that can be used to charge, synchronize, or – most important – power the iPod while it is recording. This is critical for some users because, due to constant hard-disk usage, a 30 GB 5G iPod can only record 1.5 hours and a 60 GB model 3.5 hours of digital audio before the battery dies. On the other hand, for those of us are not going to carry around an AC adaptor anyway, this is a reason to be annoyed at Apple rather than to choose one iPod recorder over another. (Why couldn't they have kept a small-file, low-power recording option for those of us who just want to record lectures or conversation?)
(FYI, Apple has provided two voice recording quality options for the 5G iPod video: 'CD quality' at 1.4 mbps stereo and 'low quality' at 352 kbps mono – 5.5 times the bit-rate of an iTunes mono download.)
The Griffin is less ugly than the Belkin, but lacks the iPod-case feature and the mini-USB port, and like the Belkin has built-in stereo microphones (i.e., hard disk noise) and no speaker.
My choice is the Xtrememac Micromemo, both because it has a separate (detachable) mono microphone and because it has a speaker. The separate microphone means no hard disk noise on your recordings. (You can also attach better quality stereo microphones, as you can with the other two as well.) The speaker means that you can listen to recordings immediately without using headphones. Also, I would assume that you can use the speaker to listen to songs or podcasts as well as voice memo recordings – a whole new market for Xtrememac.
The main disadvantage of the Micromemo, aside from the lack of the Belkin's iPod-case feature and mini-USB port (and the fact that it's not for sale yet), is that the fools put an on/off button right in the middle of the speaker. This has to mean a lower-quality speaker – and anyway, why can't everything be controlled through the buttons on the iPod itself? (The ideal iPod voice recorder would have only a microphone input, a speaker, and a pass-through dock connector.) But for now, for me, it's the best choice.448 of 555 people found this useful
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