Sound recorder (4 Viewers)

[iveljay]

Minor footnote on the term 'field' as with many English words its background and use has got blurred over the years, but as some old soldier explained to me in the 1950s it is an abbreviation of 'field of battle' dating back to the times when battles were rapidly changing environments with cavalry charges coming from all directions etc and things had to be portable to be rapidly deployable as things changed. In the case of field guns they were both redeployable and water resistant, but as technology entered the equation, field telegraphs, field cameras and even field glasses were not. Since the only folks who could afford these toys in civilian life were of the upper classes who generally had military backgrounds, the term field moved from the battle fields to the grouse moors etc. In modern parlance they were field deployable, which possibly explains why things with the adjective 'field' are merely portable versions of static versions, such as studio recorders and is not a good guide to their resilience in the field. Now where did I leave my shooting stick?........which of course doesn't shoot anything!

 

[Elkhornsun]

I have tried using self-powered microphones with my iphone X and the results have been exceedingly bad. Apple keeps needlessly increasing the camera resolution but ignore the mic which is unfortunate. Bird songs I can clearly hear are not picked up on the iphone. Anything else is going to outperform the audio capture of the iphone.

I would love to use Merlin bird ID using audio on my iphone but the phone audio is too poor to be usable. I instead record on a Sound Devices MixPre II and then feed the audio recordings into a computer.