My first full-time job as a news reporter, nearly 25 years ago, called for me to get a voice recorder. I bought the Panasonic RR at a pawn shop in Hobbs, New Mexico. It looked cool—thin, compact, sleek yet sturdy—and had a clever "dial" control. But it was early days for digital recorders, the recordings were of poor quality, and the auto-detection feature seemed… haunted. I soon bought a better one. A back-of-the-drawer find two decades on, I learn that in the meantime this terrible gadget has become a cult item. It is the "Holy Grail of EVP"—electronic voice phenomena. The fact that it records room noise as warbling compression artifacts made it perfect for ghost hunting!
A video from the Center for Inquiry offers a good introduction.
The sound quality was poor, but ghost hunters began reporting mysterious voices showing up, captured when no other living person was around. Over the years, the DR60 has gained somewhat of a legendary status with die-hard paranormal enthusiasts who claim this model – and only this particular model – is the best device for capturing spirit voices. In this episode, I take a deep dive into what makes this recorder work, and demonstrate not only the extremely poor sound quality, but also where these "voices" are coming from (Spoiler Alert – it's not ghosts).
Higgy Pop took a deep dive into the gadget's weird ways.
The VAS feature made the DR60 perfect for quick-fire EVP sessions where the investigator would record for a minute or two and then review the audio before continuing. The lack of pauses in the recording sped this up dramatically and working in this way reduced the needed to go through hours of audio after an investigation. It also meant that if an answer was heard as an EVP, the investigator could question the response further in their next quick-fire burst of questions.
There's a legend on the internet and amongst ghost hunters that Panasonic issued a product recall on the RR-DR60 due to numerous complaints of "unexplained voices" in customers' recordings. It's said that the manufacturer issued an updated version of the product with improved electromagnetic shielding to overcome the problem. Since there are no official statements on the matter available, it's hard to say for sure whether poor internal shielding was at play.
Panasonic confirmed that there was never a recall—a ghost story about a ghost story. In the hype around the Panasonic RR-DR60, Chris Amandier explores another curious aspect to the device: it's about as old as a portable device can be while still registering to its user as contemporary equipment.
I also think that nostalgia might be at work. In the last couple episodes, I talked about nostalgia and paranormal investigation, from the use of spirit boxes to instant photography in ghost hunting. Many of the devices that we use to investigate the paranormal happen to be iconic technology connected to the 1980s and the 1990s. I think that nostalgia has a large influence on the devices we choose to use to investigate the paranormal.
Here's more from Amandier, including a lovely pencil illustration of it. There are so, so many YouTube videos featuring it. And here's a technical review of defects that might have caused the DR60 to sound that bad.
Panasonic also made AM/FM radios with the same distinctive casement. Though the ghost nexus of low-quality digital recordings and "voices" isn't a factor, a canny paranormal entrepreneur appears to be reselling them as "spirit radios."
