In considering buying a good quality recording device for listening back to my playing (nothing I have just now can capture double stopping without it just becoming a warbling mess) I have realised I don't know what I will play it back on. I have only a laptop with naff internal speakers that have no punch to them. If I record something in a fabulous lossless format I can't see any options that allow me to play them back without converting them to a format where I crop that quality back off again. How do you usually listen back to things like LPCM recordings? Even if I could afford to invest in quality speakers at the same time as buying an expensive recording device there is nowhere to put them, I don't have access to power and a workstation at the same time. If you write the files to a CD how do you do that so they can play on a standard CD player as if they were a CD rather than as a collection of files? Are there other ways of playing the audio back in high quality?

Sorry I can't answer your question about playing the files back on CD - however, would you consider getting a set of good earphones / headphones? They would cost much much less than speakers, and obviously require hardly any space to store them.

After discussion of the same point with a friend who uses a sophisticated recorder ---but without its own speaker---I bought the same recorder, and decided to try the small portable speakers I bought to use with an iPod or my CD Walkman. I got a connecting lead, and they do work fine. Far superior reproduction than speaker on my laptop or on a mobile phone.
The advantage of speakers over headphones is that you can also play along with the recroding, or use the recorder / speaker set up to record and play others (eg workshops or classes) and play along at home. I got mine from Amazon a few years ago, and they come in a wide range of qualities -----I suppose you get what you pay for.

How are you planning to do play back? You need good quality DACs / AMPs to do playback coupled with decent speakers / studio monitors / headphones.

Cheapest option would be iPod / iPhone (Wolfson or Cirrus Logic DAC) coupled with very good pair of headphones. If you also want to listen whilst commuting, in-ear monitors are best in the line of Ultimate Ears triple-fi / Sennheiser ie8 / Shure se535.

By LPCM I assume you mean WAV format. Any PC should be able to play that back. On the other hand mp3 comes in a variety of flavours and choosing one of the higher definitions (say 192) means you will get a smaller file than WAV but not much reduction in quality. File size isn't much of an issue these days though with disc drives being so cheap.

That said, I would tend to record in WAV but then import as Apple Lossless (because I'm an on a mac) into iTunes then save copies to other formats if I want to or burn a CD directly.

To burn a CD from your PC you need to ensure you have a "writeable" CD drive and you need some software (possibly Nero) though I think some current versions of Windows have built in CD burning.

I've recently bought some spangly headphones (Sennheiser HD598) and they do make a huge difference and a lot more detail comes over when something is played back.

I have the built in software for Windows 7 but I don't know what option I need to select for "write this as if it's a CD for an audio CD player" as opposed to "Please write each of these files as a file in file folders". What do you choose for writing a bog standard audio CD as opposed to a CD designed to be read by computers and MP3 CD players? I've never bought one of the audio blanks, perhaps when you insert an audio blank rather than a PC blank it comes up with the right options automatically? I realise you can write audio on a PC blank, but then it pops up with all sorts of questions, maybe the audio version is a lot easier.

Oh, and I can't really wear headphones. I am pretty deaf and wear an impressive pair of giant hearing aids, so if I want to hear anything it either has to plug into my hearing aids or play on speakers. With speakers I tend to be able to crank it loud enough to hear with no hearing aids and be able to re-equalise it to account for the losses in my hearing. With modern playback devices and very recent headphones they are supposed to conform to EU restrictions on how loud they can play the sound. 85dB to me is about the noise of a leaf blowing in the wind. I don't ideally like listening to music with my hearing aids in because it's passing through a second microphone and another set of digital reprocessing. I don't mind that when I am listening to enjoy, but listening to analyse you need to hear exactly how it is. It's very hard, obviously everyone hears things a certain amount differently but I'm aware that how differently I hear things is another order of magnitude. I have now been to so many recorder ensembles with hearing aids in that recorders with no hearing aids sound like alien objects and I have to leave them in to listen to recorders. Viola I generally play without as the vibrations are easier to work with, but mean to pick the brains of someone in my new orchestra who wears the same brand but a less powerful model, and I notice he wore them for the concert.

Interesting to know that listening directly to the recording device is a viable option, though, I have a hearing aid input lead that I can plug into a standard headphone socket, that may well be enough to pick up what I want to hear. Lots to mull over.

With burning the CD go for the audio option and then any old cheap CD-r should then be playable in a hifi.

With the headphones, unless you have some very strange Lt Uhura style hearing aids they ought to be large enough to cover ear and aid (certainly the 'flesh' coloured ones people have behind the ear)

I gather its also possible to get headphone amps that can drive them harder if need be, I don't know if that will allow breaking the 85dB limit. I suppose an option might be to try nad find some second hand professional ones from before 2006.

Choose the first option if you want the CD to be playable on a standard CD player. Note that once you have written files to it and it has been "finalised" you can't write any additional tracks to it.

The other option just writes the files as "data" files which is fine if you are playing through a computer or MP3 player.

I'm not positve but I don't think that applies to playback direct from the headphone socket of a computer. If the output is too low then the only sensible approach (if you are going to use your computer) is to take a "line output" (which on computers these days tends to double as the headphone socket unless you have a fancy sound card) into some external amplification - your hi fi for example. I have a gadget which allows me to stream from iTunes on the mac wirelessly to the hi-fi. It will go just as loud as any other input (i.e. very loud). Have you tried the lead to your hearing aids direct from the computer?

That's one of the best you don't need a headphone amp!

RoseRodent: If you want balanced clean output, try to listen to Studio monitors

For anyone considering recording/playing back their music, it's important to remember that the audio chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

It's pointless getting a state of the art recording device and feeding it from cheap microphones or playing it back through small, cheap speakers.

The best way imo (and as has been suggested already) is to use decent headphones for playback, and just record via a PC soundcard using a reasonable quality electret microphone.

Or you could play it back through a good hifi system.

To get anything better will require microphones costing at least ?100 each and requiring phantom power which means you need a soundcard or mixer that can provide it, plus a studio quality power amplifier and monitor system such as someone with a home recording studio might use. A very expensive solution!

Not so. Many people on the forums are getting very good results from the current batch of mobile recorders from Zoom, Edirol, Olympus, etc.

If you play it back through poor speakers it will sound poor, no matter how good the recorder.

Of course it depends on how you define good results.

It's not a question of size (although they are slightly larger than a cochlear implant processor) but of the fact that if you cover a powerful hearing aid it produces feedback. That lovely noise you get when you are testing microphones and hold them too close to the amp. Only really, really loud. Directly into your earhole. Through a deep fitted mould which has no audio leakage. Ow.

I will have a go at burning an audio CD of something I know the sound quality of and sticking it in our hifi to see what it makes of it and will go from there.

I anyone has the Sony ICD SX712 (in any of the permutations of letters after it, those are just bundle details) I'm interested to hear how you got on, as it is one of the cheaper options, but is usually compared to the Zoom H1 rather than the next level up. Don't know how it compares to the Olympus LS-11, for example, as they are different price points so tend not to be compared.

I have an Olympus VN-8700PC and that's good enough for me, just using its built in microphone, it has a socket for adding a microphone, which would presumably improve quality. Its also possible to playback straight from the device, both from its own speaker and from a headphone socket plugged into something else.

I was questioning your assertion that a pair of phantom powered mics and mixer are required for decent recordings. I didn't comment on playback. I'm quite sure a novice would get better results from something like a Zoom H2 than having to fuss about mastering mic placements and mixers. I have heard comparative recordings and I would be very hard pressed to reliably say which were recorded on a Zoom and which were recorded using a crossed pair of cheapish (?100 is pretty cheap) capacitor mics such as AKG C1000s.

Now professional recordings made on specialist kit like Neumanns or a DPA array are something else but that's not what we are looking at here.

Of course I agree that good playback equipment is needed if you want to hear a recording accurately.

Ah, fair enough. I was confused because you quoted more that just that from my post.

I also agree that a relatively non-techie person will be better off with a simpler solution, even if the theoretical quality is compromised.