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Re: moles and atrac

Subject: Re: moles and atrac
From: Marty Michener <>
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 13:33:43 -0500
At 12:25 PM 12/31/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>Klas Strandberg wrote:
>
> > Okay, I would personally make a choise here: I would go for the best
> > recordings I could make, and then care only about the fans with equipment
> > good enough!

The classic dilemma, as I discussed with Professor Peter Paul Kellogg ca. 1957,
is in the commercial recording of the ruffed grouse booming.  HI-FI or NOT 
HI-FI?

If you get a really good recording, as I have recently with my ME-67 at 20 
ft with NO
bass-roll off, and listen to the WAV on Bose Acoustimass speakers or on my
Sennheiser headphones, you get better than 95% (I am guessing) of the energy
below about 100 hz.  Each beat of the grouse wing looks like you grabbed the
microphone diaphragm and jerked it out and then in for about a 20 ms .
I can hear it       I can record it         I can play it,
But on most computer systems, my users who want to learn birds, cannot
reproduce it.  The same was true of phonograph players in 1957.  The record
groves were just not far enough apart to give the needle much of a slow jerk.

For listening on today's computer speaker systems, if I left the file that 
way, my users
might dispute there was ANY grouse sound at all.  So, in the outgoing 
version, I have
to emphasize the mid-range frequencies, so the users at least can hear the 
accelerating
beat PATTERN of the male grouse and know sort-of what to listen for every 
spring.  Their
only recourse otherwise is to turn up playback the gain so the speakers 
distortion from lack
of compliance produces audible overtones.

my best regards,

Marty Michener
MIST Software Associates PO Box 269, Hollis, NH 03049 

EnjoyBirds.com  - Software that migrates with you.    http://www.EnjoyBirds.com

"And some rin up hill and down dale, knapping the chucky stanes to pieces 
with hammers, like sae many road makers run daft. They say it is to see how 
the world was made."   --  Sir Walter Scott, St.Ronan's Well, 1824



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