OM Digital Solutions TP-7 Telephone pick up

After a few "We never said that" deals with my insurance company, cable company, and ISP, I find myself recording more and more phone calls just to protect my own interests. Its a shame you can't just access the NSA archives, but for the moment I guess I'll just have to make my own recordings.=== The Good Stuff ===* The device works just like they promised. Put the earpiece in, and use your phone normally. I downloaded a free copy of Audacity, and plugged the pickup into my Windows PC, and got excellent results once I made a quick calibration of the levels. Both sides of the conversation are certainly audible, even if it is not the highest quality recording in the world.* Unusually for me, the ear piece fit in my ear and was comfortable to wear, at least for an hour or two. Not sure I'd want to wear it all day, for a single hour or two, it wasn't too bad. There are three different earpiece options, and the one that was already installed when it shipped worked fine for me.* The plug was a very snug fit into the MIC jack on my laptop. There was no noise from the plug moving in the jack.=== The Not-So-Good Stuff ===* This is not a direct line-in recording, but rather a live microphone. So just about any noise in the environment will get picked up. Most of my tapes have clicking noises from the phone hitting against my ear and this earpiece, the sound of papers and stuff rustling while I am on the phone, keyboard clicking, and of course the dog barking. It would seem like the directionality of the microphone could have been a little better thought out.* The cable is not the sturdiest of things, especially since sooner or later I will forget my self and get up with the pickup still attached.=== Summary ===It works well for my application, which is a wireless phone and for occasional and relatively short use. I would much rather a line-input solution, but that seems to be a tall order for some reason. I wouldn't want to wear this thing for 8 hours, and the sound quality and noise rejection could certainly be improved, but for recording "customer service" calls, it works fine.

I use the telephone pickup with a DS2 recorder, though it seems to me that it would work with almost any recorder that had a standard mike input jack.The device is a small, foam-cushioned microphone (about the size of an i-pod bud) that you put in your ear... So it picks up the acoustic vibrations as they pass between the telephone and your own eardrum. In contrast to magnetic pickups that can show up on sniffers, I don't see any way that the people at the other end would know that the conversation is being recorded when this purely acoustic pickup is used.I have used it to record business transactions with large corporations, covering my responsibility by saying their standard phrase "this conversation may be recorded for quality assurance purposes". (I wonder whether it is fair to say this while we are in the "for information on your bill, please press 3 now" phase of the transaction? )Overall, the results with the TP-7 were satisfactory --- the telephone's audio output seems to be major factor in determining the ovreall quality of the recording that one makes. This pickup offers a fairly simple, economical way of recording both ends of a telephone conversation.

The only problem I have with the TP-7 is the quality of the cord. I would have liked one a little more beefy and coated with a more flexible rubberized plastic.Now to the good: everything. It is comfortable to wear and doesn't interfere with the phone or conversation. I don't know why some have criticized the quality of the recording, but I have a feeling it has more to do with the recorder than it does with this mic.I use this with the stereo adapter (included) with a ZOOM H1 recorder. The quality is great, and I've even used it with the ZOOM plugged into my video camera's external mic for a documentary I'm working on. The quality has always been superb.My guess is that if someone has it jacked into a stereo recorder, they aren't using the stereo adapter (mono has one "stripe" on the male jack... sorry, there's no other way to say it. Stereo has two stripes). If they're jacking directly into the external mic port, it will only record on the left channel, resulting in a signal that is only 50% its potential.This is the best phone mic out there, and a great price on it as well.