Q3 recorder-player

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As unemployed by buying this book you can support my family with the necessary income to live! We live in a country of no nearly no jobs or opportunities to work(Greece)

And this is the latest of the products tested on behalf of the radio friend. I took from him USD5 about 9 months ago after my Creative Zen for unknown reasons its battery was completely drained and couldn’t find a way to revitalize it. I didn’t notice how it happened but the only I suppose I carelessly or a thing very close to it pressed the power button.

As noticed in another posting my original thought was to use a specialized line-in recorder to record from external sources mainly ripping tapes and vinyl records as part of my job to rip friends and other people 's own audio material and by a way to use it for shortwave logs and sometimes internet streams. Zen v was proper for this job but its battery drained by mistake causing the player to behave as ‘dead’.

The replacement Q3 is a small Fm and mp3 player and recorder, with ability to record from it’s in built microphone. It is smaller than a pack of cigarettes of just 10 x 6 x 1.7 cm with many buttons and sockets

On the top it uses a 3 way switch for off / mp3 /radio

On the front panel it has a LED display used as file time counter Fm freq and shows the battery condition and blinking recording LED . At the right of display there are two buttons to change between music and voice folder which is really the folder of all recordings.

Under the display is the rec-pause /stop/ and repeat buttons

a numeral keyboard is shown on the bottom with a repeat and enter buttons. Used for the freq and direct file change and delete (operation I never used)

FF - next / play pause / REW - previous buttons

On the bottom there is a socket for the micro SD memory. I used a 8 GB an old auxiliary mem 4 years ago that has not been used for very long time !The older times I used it for the defunct unused Sansa mp3 player as aux memory to play different kinds of music, mainly HM .

On the right part there are the sockets: earphone, line in, USB and the analog VOLUME CONTROL (i.e. a potentiometer)

I always use my Koss in-ear-phones.... which have very good audio. Not as good as the Sony??? But still very good to listen and test it.

And on the rear part there is a socket for a Nokia BL5B battery. Very nice idea to use a very famous company's battery products. My mobile uses a BL4C battery and my Degen 1126 uses a BL5C battery and both fit perfectly to the socket of 1126. The 5B is shorter by ca 2.5mm. As my Nokia 6300 had a problem with its charger cable base (from inside the mobile's socket )i use the Degen radio to charge also the two spare batteries .

Anon Co could not send the player with batteries or extra customs charges could be added.

IN order not to use the DE1123 all the time as charger just in case it gets damaged , i bought a wall type BL battery charger via eBay. Its cost is only $2.5 bought on late 14 quite before we did the idea for Q3.

As anon couldn’t provide batteries we searched again on ebay to find suitable battery. We found a clone type with ca 2-2.5 USD Anna from Anon was very helpful to search for us for such a model.Kudos to her. I not sure who was the seller but this clone battery turned the wall charger too hot many times so that i could not even touch the battery! The batteries required ca 2.5 to be burned ie fully charged . Until mid August a very hot day, when the next day the charger got short circuited and switched the house's general switch off due to a short-circuit.

The other Nokia clone batteries cause no problem to the wall charger

We then tried to find a new original BL5B Nokia battery from ebay to replace the low quality battery . At 5 USD it was a good deal. In the local market it was not easily available, possibly that most mobiles using it are extinct or possibly due to customs control, caused mid Jul 15 , banning imports to Greece . Someone advised us its cost is nearly10-12 euros.

Notice that Paypal cannot for the time being does not accept Greek credit cards!

Playing the mp3 player:

It is used with the on off switch in the middle position. Once a SD card is used , it can immediately start playing from the first song stored. It cannot stop playing unless you press the pause button on the right set of buttons . Stop button will repeat the same song from the start.

MP3 WMA and WAV files are playable. Have not tested if all bit rates are playable so far , but all my files are of 32-48 for WMA and 96 for MP3 and can be played well . These bit rates are quite sufficient to my ears . A partial listing has been transferred from my Muvi 18 .

REW and FF buttons can run the player to 2x . Pressing Next/ Previous have reaction of ca 0.2 secs of fast song change.Fair for songs but not so good for very long recordings.

Also good for listening to your recordings in the voice folder . However there is a mini problem: once you shut off the player you have to once again search the file.This is in contrast to the mp3 folder

Audio via the speaker is rather poor similar to the audio you can listen with most mini computer speakers . In contrast to it , using the earphones produces excellent audio . I compared it with my Muvi 18 which also has very good sound on the same song with the same headphones (Sennheiser HD497) that produced +exactly+ the same sound quality.

Using the microphone:

This is something i cant locate .It is used in the mp3 player by pressing the REC button . a operation used many times with good to very good audio quality as later heard by earphones from the recording . Very similar to the old Sony voice recorder i had many years ago (about 10?)

Using the FM radio

Audio is rather 'bassy' and lacks stereo spatiality. If we determine zero as the middle point and 9 as the extreme right and left points (ie the heads point ) the sounds are heard to maximum +/- 5-6 points .

ATS can be used by pressing the play button at the right panel. it stores all stations in the band . As radio it uses its own inner antenna if I can say this way and cannot be enhanced with the external earphone cables. Its sensitivity is medium and can scan to most stronger stations Around 78 have been found in my area . MY fav of 106.5 extreme is heard very poor to poor which is a bit less than most Tecsun radios tested in the home, Selectivity is rather low (meaning a wide filter )

106.3 FM can many times be heard in that frequency instead of 106.5 (a difference of 15 db units in PL380)

I prefer to tune directly via the keypad for faster results . I have used it to record some interesting interviews from FM 100 a Greek language program of my Facebook friend Mary Leria , specialized in children psychology, children , and related festivities in the city.

In-line recording :

This is made by connecting the provided stereo jumper cable (a double 3.9 male-plug cable of ca 50 cm) and can be used in Mp3 and FM modes surpassing them. Audio quality is the same as the original , at least for my ears .

Pressing stop will revert to the mode and will play the last recording if it is on Mp3 mode Once again will resume the line in listening .

This is the bitrate of the recorded line-in files

This is the bitrate of the recording microphone files:

Some necessary technicalities:

-All recordings are made in MP3 on 128 bit rate 32 kHz . You cannot change this bit rate which is rather bad in case you need higher sampling. wish it had this ability. But even this bit rate offers very good recording fidelity.

-All recorded files are stored in the same directory called REC. with a serial number and a leter suffix. It is easy to understand that the suffix F means FM , M is microphone , and L is line in ,The serial number is the same as the number shown in the LED display

You can also store unrelated files or recs with names changed . This can shift the serial number shown in the LED with the number of the unrelated files stored

-If your recordings are longer than 1 hour, the player will split to one hour recordings. The last days I used the player to record from my tablet from several online stations from my fav country for a minimum of 4 hours. I 've seen this splitting once it exceeds the 59.00 mins. For safety reasons i preferred to remove the battery and connect it directly to the grid via the power adaptor.

-The least and most insignificant : If a song or recording is too high , lowering the volume is necessary.This happened also in normalized files. Very low audio VC levels can shift the sound towards one earphone.

-About 8 hours are the maximum to be used with the clone batteries . Have not tested with the original Nokia battery.

-Although i think in the start of using this player , music button could change the music directories after an unknown reason the button does not do anything.

The mp3 playback goes in series the way the files were stored from the computer starting from the root directory.The card I use was full of hard rock songs though i kept only 5 directories from that list i.e. about 500 MB or less .

My Muvi collection of 125 mp3/wma songs are put in the root directory are played in the start even if they were put later than the hard rock songs .

Verdict : 5/5

In this lengthy article I analyzed in full the Q3 multi operation player recorder. Considering its relatively low price of $25 (I paid the half to him ) its operation and fidelity is exceptional , possibly very close to the more professional models available on the market . no flaws except the low FM stereo spatiality.

The cheapest recorder I found in the local market is priced at 99 Eu two years ago before i selected to buy the Creative Zen V as line in recorder. This is the Zoom H1 V2 with the same price today end of year. It is a dual mike and line in recorder suitable for stereo field recording with many bit rate selections starting from ca 32 to as much 320 kb for MP3 , Google for more) It is still cheap though quite excessively exceeds my today's budget . The only it lacks is radio.