"Randolph S. Little" wrote:
>
> NatureRecordists:
>
> You may note that Cornell's Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds has
> updated its own web advice regarding field equipment for recording
> natural sounds.
Let's take this by the numbers:
Go to:
http://birds.cornell.edu/LNS/
The homepage of Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds
Now if you are a novice wanting advice on equipment where will you go.
The link that says "Techniques for Recording Nature" is the most likely
one, click it:
http://birds.cornell.edu/LNS/recordingnature/recordingnature_index.html
Now what link will this novice click? Techniques & Equipment? Click...
I did not give the link as you are in frames and it won't change at the
top of your browser, but the address of the frame you get to is:
http://birds.cornell.edu/LNS/recordingnature/html/recordingnature_techequip=
.html
This page contains three lines of text under the title:
The first:
http://birds.cornell.edu/LNS/recordingnature/html/recordingnature_techequip=
1.html
"Read a comprehensive review of available and commonly-used field
recording equipment" spends nearly half it's text on a detailed
discussion of cassette recorders. Then a fairly large section on the now
soon to be dead Dat format. Then a section dissing MD, hard to call it
anything else when there are sentences like this in it:
"Other species (e.g. many songbirds) do have large loudness changes over
very short times in their vocalizations. If you try to record such
species with a MiniDisc, you'll likely introduce some distortion."
Maybe they never read how ATRAC has special techniques built into it
exactly to handle this. It looks for and detects such changes, and
switches to a more detailed mode during the transition. Nor have they
gone out and done the simple test and recorded some. Can't record
loudness changes? Sure can, I have lots and lots of recordings that
contain perfectly recorded rapid transients. You can easily mess up such
things by having your gain set too high and clipping, but ATRAC won't be
the culpret then.
They make a big issue about the magical properties of animal hearing
compared to human. What magical properties? There are none, they use the
same fundamental mechanisms we do. They also use this to expose even
more of their ignorance, believing that some part of the sound is
dropped. ATRAC tosses out 100% of the input sound and then it magically
recreates it when you play the recording. It does not say I'll keep this
sample and throw that one out. Though the technical folks often like to
describe it that way as they know that few would have a hope of
understanding if they really said exactly what was going on.
And then there is the lame promise to someday test MD, along with their
lie about ATRAC 2 as if it showed something. Are they stalling because
they are having trouble finding something to Diss? That promise is
getting pretty old. I guess we should be happy they noticed there are
different versions of ATRAC.
There are two more lines on that page, links to a english and a spanish
version of their big lie about ATRAC 2, though at least the spanish
version left out the illustrations:
"Read "Techniques for Audio Recording Vocalizations of Tropical Birds"
-- an article written by
Greg Budney, MLNS Curator, and Bob Grotke, MLNS Supervising
Audio Engineer."
I'm sorry, this is not any real change, no matter how much they pretty
the backgrounds, put bird pictures on or fancy up the frame
organization. The pages are pretty, there I said something nice about
them. The same exact dissing and, it turns out, lies, they have been
doing since at least 1997 is still there, and prominently displayed for
any novice making equipment choices to read, they are lead right to it.
And their "new" page on equipment is just their old one slightly
changed. No wonder so many novices go out and get a Radio Shack cassette re=
corder.
If they want to be helpful, they will do more good just removing all
three links from that page and saying nothing.
Walt
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