Right hardware for different places

[maigo1979]

Hi,
i am new to record sexsounds, but not to hear them I have 4 places to hear:
1. apartments of my neighbors. There i can hear through a gap between door and floor or door case. They are very quiet, so i need a good mic. Here i think i need a cardioid mic?
2. on my balcony. There are sometimes opened windows, when my neighbors having fun. I thought that i can use here a parabolic mic?
3. around sound from the street where i live. Here is the voice recorder better?
4. hotels, what else. I think the best is to use the voice recorder?

I need a portable recording device which can record a long time. Thats why i wrote voice recorder. I think i take a voice recorder with mic in and can it use also without external mic. Is it right? I found some info about these olympus but some of these devices has no line in. Can you say which device is currently nice to have?

I have read the last 5 hours in the how-to and hardware forum, but find just old messages or nothing usefully. I want by my first equipment and will not pay money for unfunctional equip.

Are my considerations right or does i take the wrong way? Can you please give me some examples? The best is to get something from germany and not so expensive.

Thank you all.
maigo

[sc0tt-uk]

Hey Maigo,

Smart move to do your research first - the force is strong with you sir

In my experience, a good field recorder will get you the same results nowadays as screwing around with external gear. At the price point we're talking about, the only exception I can think of is that a good parabolic mic hooked up to a quiet preamp would definitely get superior results for recording over longer distances, but that's an unwieldy setup and probably wouldn't be worth the money unless you had a regular scenario in mind.

So, I think you won't go wrong with an Olympus. I've had a few devices from their LS series over the years and have been mostly satisfied. The battery life is great, noise floor is fairly low on the internal mics (and getting better with the mic inputs on the models they released last year if you ever need to plug in an external). Their auto-gain responds to sudden changes in environment better than the other manufacturers I've used (Zoom, Tascam, Edirol). Their onboard MP3 encoding sounds passable to my ears. On a few of the devices they released late last year, there's a neat recording buffer setting that would be kinda useful for "our little hobby" too. If you check out the products in the LS series, grab one with the usual stereo mics and a central cardioid mic. Occasionally I've found recording in mono with only that central mic has been useful in busier environments. Another point is that most of the Olympus recorders look like fairly non-descript gadgets compared to most field recorders which make the mics a lot more obvious. I've beaten a hasty retreat and past one off as a mobile phone by having it in a case and talking into it to avoid being busted once

I'm only one member of course, so don't rush out and spend crazy money on my recommendations. There are other people here getting great results with other equipment, no doubt some of it will be cheaper.

[maigo1979]

Hey Scott
thanx for your fast answer and for the compliment I thought i can use a parabolic microphon to amplify the wished sound from the other side of my balkony. In summer are a great chance to find open windows sometimes with music or vacuum cleaner and sometimes with the sound we like. But because of the music and vacuum cleaner i cant hear it. I thought i can select the sound from eachother and hear through the bad sound to the good sound . At last night i think about it and came to the result: i build an own parabolic microphon. It can be much hard an plastic bowl for small money a good directional microphon which i anyway wanted and a little bit time, wire and tape should bring a good and very cheap result. I think something like that (i am not a artist, so excuse my very simple figure)

and works like that:


Sure i must try the right distances for mic and small reflector.
Can someone tell me if this maybe works? I am unfortunately no audio crack.
Thanx a lot maigo

[Summer256]

I really recommend the SONY PCM-M10 recorder. It's pretty expensive but the sound it captures is incredible. It has a range of settings that can suit any occasion. If you can afford one, and if you get one, I recommend the following settings -
- Mic Sensitivity - HIGH
- Rec Level - MANUAL
- REC Mode - LPCM 96.00 KHz/24Bit
- Limiter - ON
Then turn the record volume up to 9 and half if you're far away or 8 if you're close.

It will pick up everything super clearly. The limiter will stop anything from clipping if it's too loud. It's the only voice recorder I've ever had that records sound on location better than I hear with my own ears.

If you follow this link you can also find out how to format a 64G micro SD card for it. On an MP3 setting (still very high quality) I can record for over a month! (with the unit plugged into the wall). But it has the best battery life of any unit I've seen and with good lithium batteries it can run for 5-6 days.

http://www.head-fi.org/t/456327/sony-pc ... player/120

Plus I dropped mine once very hard on concrete. It got a little scratched but still works perfectly.

The only downside of it is the size. It's about the size of an iPhone. One plus about that is you can pretend it is a mobile phone if you're walking around with it. And because of it's size and shape it doesn't look suspicious. If anything people don't bother you because they think you're on the phone.

A cheaper and smaller option is the SONY ICD-PX820. It can record for about 3 days with good batteries. The sound I get from that is better than either of the two Olympus recorders I have.

The downside of parabolic microphones is how obvious it looks as to what you are doing.

[Audio]

Maigo

did you buy one of the Olymus Recorders? I can recommend the LS series of which I have the LS 3. I am very satsified, Scott has given an excellent description of them as well.