Having noticed an excessive amount of noise in my recordings I decided to see
just how much was ambient and how much was from my equipment.
I used my workshop room located in the in the corner of my house that is
constructed of two concrete block walls on one side and frame walls on the
other two walls as a sound room. The first test had very faint 60 cycle buzzing
and the ticking of a battery operated clock. The second test was with the clock
removed and the lights turned off.
This recording was noiseless to my ears when played through headphones at
normal volume. The waveform on my monitor screen was a single straight line
with a few tiny dots on it.
My conclusion was the noise in my recordings was, for all practical purposes,
all ambient noise, mostly wind and distant road noise.
My equipment is good but not state of the art and consists of:
Telinga parabolic stereo mic
Sony MZ R50 minidisc recorder
A SONY MDS-JB 920 deck for downloading to a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card
and played back thru a Sony 6GCH amplifier using Sony MDR-7506 head phones.
Needless to say I was very pleased with the test results.
Best regards to all,
Jim Morgan
Prescott, Arizona
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