Belkin Tune Talk Stereo

A useful iPod accessory! Toll the bells, alert the king; a useful iPod accessory!

Take an iPod and add a CD quality recorder. Now, what would you use this combination for?

If you said as a dictaphone, then we’ve got news for you sunshine: you lack imagination. Think concerts. Podcasting. A covert intelligence collection device for when you’re doing reconnaissance work with the Navy Seals.

The Tune Talk Stereo has two small microphones embedded in it, angled at about 120 degrees from each other. Each has a cardioid polar pattern, a slight dip in their upper mid-range response and sensitivity that drops off quickly after about a meter and a half. They sound good; even better than the reasonable lapel microphones you can pick up at electronics stores for twenty-odd bucks each.

To make things even better, there’s a 3.5mm jack in the base of the unit which you can use as either a line input or external microphone jack. A small slide switch will select between mic level input (with an automatic gain setting) or line level input.

In high quality mode, it records uncompressed 44.1 KHz, 16-bit, stereo wave files, and because this generates 1.411 Kb/s of data, it chews through the iPod’s batteries very quickly. It’s still a problem (but less pronounced) in low quality mode, which records a 22 KHz 16-bit mono wave file. It makes the iPod quite hot, because the data rate during recording saturates the cache very quickly, resulting in a hard drive that’s always spinning and being written to.

The recordings are placed in a ‘Recordings’ folder on the iPod that you can access once your iPod is connected to your PC through Windows Explorer. They’ll also show up in iTunes, if it’s your iPod manager of choice. You don’t even have to use the iPod cable to sync. The base of the Tune Talk has a Mini-USB socket that does the same thing.

In very loud, crowded environments you’ll have varying amounts of success depending on where you are positioned. Bear in mind that the battery will probably die on you at some point if you’re recording for more than two hours, and you can use a good quality external microphone for a better source. Our results weren’t great, but we were standing towards the back of the Hordern Pavilion and using the inbuilt microphones. Not that we’re promoting that, or anything.

This puppy only works with 5G iPods, and we would have liked to have seen more options, like recording to MP3 and recording level monitoring. And it could be a bit cheaper. As it stands though, it’s one of the most useful iPod accessories we’ve seen.