Tony,
If you have maxed out your budget on a 1000 dollar scope you will
need to shop to get into recording. I am going to attempt to guide
your research, in place of telling you what you need, recording rigs
are a combination of need, experience and resources. You can put
together a rig for a little bit of money but you may soon find the
limitations are restricting your goals. It may be OK to start this
way to see if recording is something you want to do,however, most of
the equipment will be of no use later on if you decide to improve
your rig. The recorder can be a multi use unit, using it for
playback of music. I can send you links to informative sites
covering all the elements if you want them.
Are you able to do any construction on your own? Some microphone
capsules can be assembled to your advantage. Microphone cables can
also be home made to cut cost. You can buy a parabolic dish without
a handle or microphone for 50 dollars in aluminum or 85 in
polycarbonate, there is a larger poly dish but I do not know the
cost of it. The dish size will restrict which frequencies it will
provide gain for. The microphone is where the money will be spent.
There are basically two levels of equipment; pro and consumer.
Consumer gear will let you get by but you need some of the pro level
gear to do the really quiet stuff.
You could start with one mic and do mono recording, you will soon
find that it will work for individual calls but for ambient
recording you will not like it. You need two mic's to capture any
feeling of space, a dish is not the way to record ambient sounds.
One of the limiting factors with microphones is the self noise that
the microphone produces. If the recorded sound is loud enough you
can use a mic with more self noise but you will eventually want the
quietest microphone you can afford. That is the point of many
discussions on the listserve. The microphones are not designed for
nature recording and the nature recordists are trying to find a
combination that will be reliable and do the best job. A microphone
with 20 to 25 db of self noise is going to be a negative factor in
almost all your recordings, any mic with a self noise above that is
not going to be good for quality recording. Many of the studio
microphones are large in size so that makes it difficult to mount
them in a dish. How well the microphone stands up to humidity is
another consideration. To keep cost down you could consider
microphones that could be used in the dish and removed for ambient
recording. That is a pain so you will probably wind up with more
than one microphone. How to get the stereo image is another can of
worms, there are several ways to configure the microphones, mostly
dependent on the pick up pattern of each microphone and/or the
placement of barriers. Some microphones require a 48 volt power
source, pro level recorders can do this, or you can use an external
preamp to do the power.
One thing that you will notice when you start recording is that you
can control the gain and volume of your recorder and you will hear
things that you didn't notice before. This is one of the advantages
that may spur more interest.
After you have the rig put together you will need to processes the
files in the computer, another learning curve to get past. It will
look as though you can do anything with your recording but the truth
is that you should limit your post work to minimal impact. Strive
to get the best recording while in the field. You will become an
artist that decides what you need to do to make the original sounds
play back to someone else on a variety of gear and make it sound
reasonably close to what you heard in the field. Nature recordings
are true recordings from the site, stereo recordings produced in a
studio are a combinations of tracks assembled to sound like a
natural scene.
Gerald White Muscatine,IA
--- In "Tony Greif"
<> wrote:
>
> Ok, that makes sense. My long range recordings will be birds on
open
> bodies of water...say 100+ yards. On average though, I think most
of
> my recordings will be non directional recordings of things like
> thunderstorms, waves, or if I am sitting in the middle of the
woods
> and want to record everything from the birds to the animals at the
> same time (omni directional?).
<SNIP>
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