Good recording quality: While audio doesn’t need to be podcast quality, recordings should be intelligible and free from hiss, rumbles, echoes, or the excessive background noise that plagues poorer-quality recordings.The UX560 is also the slimmest recorder we tested-at 0.43 inch thick it can easily fit in a shirt or pants pocket. Like many of the other recorders we looked at, it comes with an adequate amount of onboard storage (4 GB) but accepts microSD cards, so you can record and store hundreds of hours of recorded audio should you need it. It also offers a better collection of features than the other models we tested, with an easy-to-navigate menu system, a bright backlit screen, 39 hours of recording time (in MP3 format), 27-hour battery life, voice-activated recording to pause and restart after silences, and a pop-out USB 3.0 connector that lets you recharge the recorder and transfer files to a computer easily. It produces clear, understandable audio in classroom, quiet office, and noisy coffee shop settings. In a new round of testing in mid-2017, the UX560 received the highest overall ratings from our panel of test listeners. The UX560 is similar to our previous, now-discontinued pick, also from Sony.
