Re: digital recording media

["Steven M. Boker" <sboker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 1:10 pm -0600 11/1/99, Sheila Williams wrote:
>Dear list,
>
>I would be most grateful for advice from anyone with experience of using
>portable digital recording equipment?
>
>There seem to be two choices available now, Digital Audio Tape or Minidisc.
>

I agree that minidisc is not a good match due to compression.  Even if
you don't think you are going to process the signals as part of the
current research project, you or someone in the future might want to
do signal analysis on the streams; especially if you find an interesting
psychological phenomenon in your experiment.

I use a TASCAM DA-P1 DAT recorder.  This is a nice semi-pro level
machine that is small, portable, can be battery operated, and can
accept input from low impedence microphones.  I generally use
cardiod pattern lavaliere microphones (Audio Technica makes a nice
one) which have the desirable characteristic of unobtrusively
isolating the speaker from the environment.

If your people need to move around, you can use a wireless mic
adapter.  NADY is one company to look at.  This will allow you
to attach the lavaliere to a small device the size of a pager
and the person will be free to walk around.

When a lavalier cannot be attached to the individual, I use a cardiod
condenser mic such as the one made by Earthworks.  I really like
the Earthworks mics because they are very "flat", that is they
don't attempt to color the sound in order to make it sound more
"musical" or "intelligible".  Coloration is a bad quality if what
you want is exactly what was in the room.  Mic placement is
critical in this case if you want to attempt to isolate a speaker
as much as possible.  This solution does not work _nearly_ as
well as the lavaliere for speaker isolation, although it produces
a much better recording of what is available for the listener
to hear.

Good luck!

Steve

---
 Steven M. Boker                                 219-631-4941 (voice)
 sboker@nd.edu                                   219-631-8883 (fax)
 http://www.nd.edu/~sboker/                      219-257-2956 (home)
 Dept. of Psychology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556


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