Does voice recorder quality effect sound quality with external mic?

[caseybrunet]

I have an old digital Sony voice recorder that my wife used through college. I plan to attach a shotgun microphone to it and mount that to a tripod for closer sound when recording video. I constantly read about people using zoom h1 voice recorders because of the quality, unfortunately my budget does not allow me to use much more than what I may already have available on hand.

My question is simple: since I am using a dedicated microphone, will the voice recorder itself have an effect on over all sound quality? My guess is that sound quality will solely be a factor of microphone quality but I couldn't find a definitive answer anywhere.

 

[bouldersoundguy]

It's a matter of the weakest link in the chain. If the recorder encodes to mp3 it might not help that much to use a better mic. Why not just try it and see?

 

[Steenamaroo]

Everything in the chain has some affect on your recording.
I have a Tascam DR40 and find that it can be pretty noisy. Clean preamps would be the thing I'd look out for with portable recorders.

I don't think file format negates the need for good microphones at all.

 

[caseybrunet]

I finally found my voice recorder, its a Sony ICD-p520. Unfortunately it has very few options for recording quality and it is limited to 250 mB of storage. I think I am out of luck with that option.

The tascam DR40 (look like it is about $140) is just out of my price range right now (just blew my budget on all of my other equipment). Could either of you recommend a voice recorder I could use with the external microphone that would record in .Wav format 24 bit 48KHz that would not cost as much? I know I am kind of asking a lot, but any help is appreciated.