Portable setup for recording natural sounds

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yama
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Portable setup for recording natural sounds

Post by yama »

Hi, I'm wondering if anyone knows what's good hardware for recording sounds in the wild. I imagine that for about the price of a phone you could get a good mic with some form of storage for recording very high quality audio, but I don't know anything about what would make a piece of hardware good.

Appreciate any help.
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thumbknuckle
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Re: Portable setup for recording natural sounds

Post by thumbknuckle »

The Zoom portable recorders are nice. I have the H2:

https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail ... y-recorder
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Shadow_7
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Re: Portable setup for recording natural sounds

Post by Shadow_7 »

I have the korg mr-1000. It's great, although I only get about 2 hours on batteries and it has a 6 hour session limit. I have 2x sound device MM-1 preamps that are good for 4 hours on 2x AAs each. And a variety of mics, I like the avenson STO-2 stereo pair for what I record. But they have a high noise floor for nature stuff. Great for marching bands though as they don't distort when in proximity of excessively loud sources.

My more modern setup is a laptop and steinberg UR22. The steinberg can be USB powered by another source besides the laptop. Although a 10k mAh battery seems to only get about 60 to 100 minutes powering it (the weakest link). And I have yet to use that setup remotely. If quality isn't a concern, I can use my pocketchip with a webcam or usb mic as the audio source and get about 4 hours. Or used to, I don't really know how the battery ages on that thing.
Spanner
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Re: Portable setup for recording natural sounds

Post by Spanner »

I use a Tascam DR-05

It works well.

I had only to invest the (short) amount of time required to learn how to operate it.

That Tascam DR-05 is now an obsolete model but "digital recorder" is a mature format IMHO and most units sold should record reliably close to state-of-the-art quality audio.

Inexpensive, now, too.
elisecoen
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Re: Portable setup for recording natural sounds

Post by elisecoen »

Zoom H1 Portable Digital Recorder is actually a perfect choice and Amazon dropped the price lately thus making it affordable. Keep in mind that any recorder like that will need to be near the source of the sound to get a good recording. You will also need to set the levels correctly. If you do both of those things, you can get excellent results from that recorder.
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SpotlightKid
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Re: Portable setup for recording natural sounds

Post by SpotlightKid »

Apart from a recorder, the most important thing is good wind shielding, e.g. a so-called "dead cat".
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