Right now, Walt, we are at the end of a National Park Service
soundscape project measuring the value of soundscapes as an indicator
of habitat health, dynamic and (creature) density. Working with
Stuart Gage of the Envirosonics Lab at Mich. State Univ. (CEVL),
along with Rudy Trubitt and Jack Hines, friends and field associates,
we've been gathering our data over the past year at Sequoia National
Park utilizing Sony M1 DATs, a Sound Devices pre-amp, and Sennheiser
MHK 30/40 M-S combo with outboard (gel-cell) power. We chose that
technology because it proved to be durable for our purposes, very
light and easy to transport w/o taking too much space, and, in the
case of the M1, expendable and easily replaceable if we happened to
lose one.
The data collection process has been effortless and has gone pretty
much without a hitch. Immediately, when we returned to the lab, all
the data was transferred to both hard disk and backed up onto CDRs
encoded in stereo with no signal processing and calibrated to the
original input levels at which the data were recorded. At the time
late last summer when we had to commit to our standardized gear, MDs
were not especially problem-free (incl. the Portadisc) and I am a bit
leary of the compression issue, particularly when we have to crunch
numbers to support our field findings sometime later this summer for
publication.
I have no problem upgrading and, in fact, would do just about
anything to find alternatives to tape or hard disk drives. I just
dont trust things that spin, or can be folded or wound. MD and solid
state formats certainly point the way to the future, in my mind, and
I will probably switch at some point when the dust settles as to the
best technologies. So we're completely in agreement.
Bernie
>Wild Sanctuary wrote:
>>
>> Good points, Walt. Especially the one(s) about Cornell. Their tech
>> advice is all too often at odds with the experience of serious
>> professionals in the field, and is not given much weight by those who
>> really know.
>>
>> We're looking into MD and solid state formats having moved and stored
>> our entire library to the digital medium and want to continue in that
>> vein.
>
>I'm not sure how you'd find MD, I've listened to how picky you can get,
>but I do recommend you try it. You'd certainly probably want to try it
>in the form of the Portadisc, which is probably the top end recorder for
>field work with it.
>
>I believe the solid state or optical disk technology are the way of the
>future. Magnetic media in any of it's forms just carries more risk.
>Optical disk technology is still evolving, but it's reliability is so
>high and it's history long enough it can be considered proven
>technology. Some form of it is the archive medium of choice. Solid state
>is on less clear footing. There are lots of ways that are not that
>uncommon for it to be compromised. And it should be considered only a
>short term storage medium. It really needs to develop a body of
>experience in nature recording to find it's problems. It's other problem
>is that the media is expensive, meaning that long field forays with it
>will be a problem, for shorter stuff you can copy off to computer and
>recycle the media.
>
>Right now, to my mind the ideal, if it was available, would be the
>640meg minidiscs used in video cameras in a recorder that recorded
>uncompressed. Those disks are as cheap to make as current audio
>minidiscs and your original would be on a archival quality medium. For
>most uses the CD standard 44k 16bit sample rate is just fine for field
>recording. Such a recorder was expected back when I first got into
>minidisc and the 640 meg disks were due out. I think what stopped it was
>the mp3 "revolution". The main thing that revealed to the manufacturers
>was the people were happy with much lower sound quality, in fact could
>often not tell the difference, and it was more important in terms of
>sales to have long playing time. So, Sony and others went to higher
>compression instead of uncompressed sound on bigger disks. They could do
>this and still stick with the 140 meg minidiscs, leaving compatibility
>more or less intact, rather than trying to build market share on a new
>disk. Research on larger minidiscs still continues, and it looks like at
>least 2 gigs is possible. But, so far that's all focused on video cameras.
>
>The end of quality sound recording is being somewhat neglected. There
>are a number of possible choices in how it will go. Right now I'd not
>expect much standardization. I only hope it's not entirely forgotten in
>the rush to more play hours. I believe there is now only a single
>factory left actually producing new magnetic tape. A indication of the
>future of DAT and other tape based systems. MD continues, but a awful
>lot of the new push is around increased compression, lower sound
>quality. We are badly in need of some new commitment to a standard high
>quality audio recording method. In some ways it resembles when digital
>recording first arrived, except then there was still a clear commitment
>to improving audio quality.
>
>I'll be real interested in what you end up doing.
>
>Walt
>
>
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--
Wild Sanctuary, Inc.
P. O. Box 536
Glen Ellen, California 95442-0536
Tel: (707) 996-6677
Fax: (707) 996-0280
http://www.wildsanctuary.com
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