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Pre amps ? (2 Viewers)

garyelton

Member
I've a LS5 olympus recorder that I am using in conjunction with a Sennheiser ME66 mic. I have noticed a degree of 'noise' when recording which is making reading/searching sonograms of some calling birds difficult. My question is is will adding a preamp to this improve / remove this and if so is there one/any that people can recommend ? Thanks
 
I've a LS5 olympus recorder that I am using in conjunction with a Sennheiser ME66 mic. I have noticed a degree of 'noise' when recording which is making reading/searching sonograms of some calling birds difficult. My question is is will adding a preamp to this improve / remove this and if so is there one/any that people can recommend ? Thanks

Hi Gary,
How do you connect LS5 to the ME66? A wrong kind of a connection causes unwanted noise.

Harry J
 
I would second that. Good, simple, single channel, portable, reliable, pre-amps tend to fall into the professional audio category, which means that we are talking in the £500 bracket. The positive side is that as they provide phantom power. In most cases all it will do is amplify all or some of the noise unfortunately.

Even a gentle breeze blowing over your dead cat will produce some noise and you have to work back from that, as adaptors and cables can contribute.

The only other thing is to record a null signal to get some idea of your internal pre-amp background noise and compare it to your unwanted noise signals. Unfortunately that process has been known to generate its own noise signature. I compared two similar short lengths of cable, one open circuit and the other with a null micophone load. The open circuit generated considerably more and different noise to that recorded with impedance. The test recorder was an LS-11, which will have similar characteristics as your LS-5 I would expect. So sticking an empty jack into the mic socket won't help I am afraid. The LS-11 noise floor was better than I expected.

This also shows how mismatched microphone adaptors etc., can generate buckets of noise in worst case scenarios.
 
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Thanks to you both. Having tried the recorder using its own mics rather than the sennhessier its seemingly the sensitivity of the later that is giving me the back ground noise ( white noise/interference).. The Sonograms are readable but searching for calls is more difficult with all this going on. The mic is a straight forward 3.5mm plug into the recorder and I don't think this is a problem. I guess I may have to live with it and try and use software to clean up the files before looking through them. Thanks again Gary
 
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