Hi, I am looking for some help to find a simple, basic, light weight digital voice recorder, nothing fancy whatsoever, the only requirement I have is that it displays time to the second. It seems impossible to find - i just need to be able to playback a recording and read a timestamp on it that is accurate to the second. Not time lapse from start of recording, i.e. not how long the recording is, but a real timestamp in hh:mm:ss - why is this so hard to find ???
Because what you want tends to be called a “surveillance recorder” not a personal sound recorder. One of the obvious requirements is an accurate clock. How do you get that? The obvious solution is an “atomic clock” with a radio receiver or using an on-line timekeeper such as time.apple.com. That means your machine needs to be on-line or radio-clear during the recording and depending on the circumstances, that can be impractical.
They make stand-alone, portable SMPTE Timecode generators. SMPTE Time Code is a plain audio signal and you can record it on one of the two channels of a stereo sound recorder. A time code reader on playback will give you the time of day down to one television frame (1/30 sec in the US) – and subject to the last time you set the clock.