Seth,
I can offer some help on two of your questions.
>First, I am a little concerned about the accepted legitimacy of
>MD-compressed bird songs for scientific archival.
In a 1999 posting to NEOORN Morton e Phyllis Isler (ornithologists at the
Smithsonian and specialists in bird vocalisations) put the matter very clea=
rly:
"About a year and a half ago, NEOORN had an excellent back and forth
discussion about Minidisks, but a number of you may not have been enrolled=
at that time, and Charles Duncan's quote from the Budney [curator
of Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds] and Grotke [MLNS audio engineer]
paper belittling Minidiscs requires a renewed response.
The key question is whether audio engineer Grotke's conclusions about
deficiencies in the Minidisk are relevant to its application to recording
and using avian vocalizations. Our conclusion, after years of using
Minidiscs, is that his conclusions are not relevant. We have also put
Nagra, cassette, and DAT recordings directly into CANARY (the Cornell
Bioacoustics Workstation) and compared these with the same recordings put
onto Minidisks and then into CANARY. We have seen no differences in the
displays (e.g. spectrograms) and because we measure vocal characteristics
from displays, we can see no difference in vocal measurements that we
take. We have never found the slightest evidence of sound distortion
caused by the MD."
The Islers use MD to archive all their recordings. The National Sound
Archive in London accept recordings on MD and I understand that Cornell now=
do so too.
>Finally, if anyone could lend suggestions on a compact, light speaker to
>use for playbacks, or plans for setting up the speaker, recorder, and mic=
>for easy use in the field, I would be most appreciative.
Playback is frowned on by many members of this list but I am an impenitent=
user. I find it convenient to carry two MDs in the field, a Portadisc for
recording and a consumer MD for playback of pre-recorded vocalisations.
This saves time as it takes quite a few seconds to change discs if you have=
only one recorder. I use a Radio Shack # 277-1008C Audio Amplifier/Speaker=
for playback. It is small (3 1/2" x 1 1/2 " x 2 1/2 inches) but
sufficiently powerful. It uses a 9 volt battery and costs only 10 dollars.=
I attach this speaker with Velcro to the front of the Portadisc's
Porta-Brace carrying case and connect the consumer MD to it with a short
cable. I have a second cable connected to one of the line-out sockets on
the Portadisc and when I want to play back something I recorded with the
Portadisc I simply disconnect the cable from the consumer MD to the speaker=
and connect the cable from the Portadisc.
Jeremy
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