Nov
18
Filed Under (General) by Rob on 18-11-2008

Here are three ways you can listen to music in remote locations which have no electricity:

The first is a wind-up cassette player, known as the “Messenger II” hand crank cassette player. It has been used by missions over the past few years. A great invention, but it still needs winding all the time to make it work and you have to have the tapes made in the first place. Find out more here.

The second (held gently in my mouth!) is the solar-powered “Megavoice” MP3 player: a portable player which can hold at least 60 hours of audio material (be it spoken word or music). It can only be listened to by around 5 people at once, but the solar panels on the back allows it to be charged up in the sunshine (now you know why you’ve not seen any in the UK!) The main drawback is that you cannot (to date) put your own recordings directly onto the Megavoice, this has to be done at their headquarters. Find out more here.

And finally, hot of the press from Australia, is the spanking brand new SABER MP3 player. Here it is, alongside the Megavoice:

As you can see, it’s much bigger. It is also sturdy, easy to use and can be heard by around 100 people at once. It has an internal memory of 1GB and a slot for a further 1GB of memory via an SD card. It is charged by turning the black handle and claims to play for 10 hours solid on a full charge. Wow! What a resource! Very useful in my line of work. In fact, I took 3 of these gizmos back to Togo with me last month and gave them to some colleagues who will be trying them out ‘on the field’. Find out more about the amazing SABER here.

That’s all for now – happy listening!



Comments:
1 Comment posted on "Sound equipment indeed!"
Justin Randolph on April 28th, 2009 at 9:05 pm #

wow! that’s really cool. won’t quite fit in your pocket but doesn’t need batteries!