I feel torn in the middle of this debate, as a minidisc user AND a great
fan of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and the Macaulay Library of
Natural Sounds. Cornell provides enormous services both to science and to=
people interested in bird recording. But the people there, like scientists=
everywhere, are naturally conservative in their assessments of new
technology. There is something to be said for consistency in data
collection techniques. I think those of us who use minidiscs owe it to
everyone to do some recordings with a single mic's signal split to feed
into a minidisc recorder, DAT, cassette, and open reel, and analyze the
spectrographs for differences and similarities. Doing this for both a
range of simple tones and complex natural sounds would show, with DATA, the=
benefits and problems of each. It's so easy to call what Cornell does
"criminal," or to dismiss the great things they do because they don't see
one issue the same. But I took their field recording course last year,
and found everyone on the staff, although concerned about the compression
algorithm issue, to be supportive of my learning how to record on both a
Marantz cassette AND a minidisc recorder. And I learned valuable
techniques in one week that it would have taken years to pick up on my own.
I would think any scientist who disagrees with Cornell's assessment of
minidiscs, and especially those who publicly ridicule them, should be
willing to do the necessary field and lab work to collect, analyze, and
compare the sounds by each technique, and publish the findings. This work=
needs to be done, and I think the people here might be the right ones to do=
it.
Laura Erickson
Duluth, MN
Science Writer Journey North
http://learner.org/jnorth/current.html
www.lauraerickson.com
There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the
birds=85 There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of=
nature-the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the wint=
er.
--Rachel Carson
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
|