Field recordings and equipment ============================== Suzanne Evans Wagner initiated this discussion. Co-discussants were Uri Horesh, Sergio Romero, Tara Sanchez, Anne Charity, Jeff Conn, Maciej Baranowski, Daniel Johnson, Malcah Yaeger-Dror and Lauren Hall-Lew. MESSAGE 1 On Thu, 24 Mar 2005, Suzanne Evans Wagner wrote: > Hi, I'm writing to all of you because you've all carried out dissertation > fieldwork fairly recently. > > Does anyone have any thoughts on the best recording equipment for socio > interviews? The easiest route for me would be to borrow a mini-disc > player from the lab, but has anyone tried something different, like > solid-state recorders or DAT tapes? I can see that recording on a > solid-state recorder would be convenient, but they're pretty expensive. > Are there any quality differences I should care about? > > Thanks, > Suzanne > MESSAGE 2 Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 09:58:57 -0500 (EST) From: Uri Horesh I followed Maciej's profesisonal advice and purchased and have been using a Marantz PMD-670. I have been happy with it (except at the time of purchase, when I saw all those dollars escaping from my bank account). I particularly like the fact that I can simply transfer files from the Compact Flash cards directly to my hard disk/CD/memory stick without going through the hassle of playing back each recording in real time. Though there should be Mini Disc recorders that do that too these days. We might not have them in the Lab, but that's a different story. There are actually smaller, cheaper devices by Marantz as well as other manufacturers, but I haven't seen them in person, let alone used them, so I can't really attest to their quality. I've included Daniel in this e-mail, who I believe is debating what to use as well, and Malcah and Lauren, who have been corresponding with a number of us on this same issue for a while now and may have additional info. Uri MESSAGE 3 Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 10:15:03 -0500 From: suzanne@babel.ling.upenn.edu Thanks, Uri. Would anyone object if I published a summary of this discussion on Penn's ling grad student webpage? Lauren-- perhaps this would also be of interest to the proposed Penn-Stanford blog. The NY Times today published an article which compared Marantz recorders with other media: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/24/technology/circuits/24reco.html They note the relative expensive of Marantz and similar recorders, but their biggest criticism is the drain on batteries. Have you or anyone else experienced problems? The NY Times also mention a new Marantz model, the PMD 660, retailing at about $500. If anyone has experience with this, please tell! Suzanne MESSAGE 4 Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 11:15:35 -0500 From: "Maciej A. Baranowski" Hi guys, At this point I would say the new PMD-660 by Marantz. B&H in NYC have them for $500. Best, Maciej MESSAGE 5 Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 11:53:39 -0500 From: suzanne@babel.ling.upenn.edu A couple of thoughts from Sergio and from Anne: Sergio -- says he's been using a mini-disc player in Guatemala for the last nine months or so. Problem is, he can't easily transfer recordings to his laptop in the field. He's doing it at the Penn lab while he's here for a few weeks. Anne -- is ordering Marantz recorders for William & Mary (her new job - yay, Anne!), although only 3 for now, since they're too expensive for her to kit out an entire class. She made a good point about balancing costs: although MD-players are cheaper, if you have to pay an RA or work-study student to transfer all your recordings to hard disk, the costs are about the same. Similiarly, you might be concerned about a student losing or breaking their recording equipment. A broken MD player sets you back a few 100 dollars less than a Marantz, but again, the time and cost of transferring recordings from MD players (plus cost of discs) makes this risk about equal. Anne and I would also like to open this discussion to two other issues: setting up or contributing to a linguistics lab, and choosing microphones. Suzanne MESSAGE 6 Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 11:16:42 -0700 From: Malcah Subject: RE: Field recordings and what microphone goes with which machine, and if any allow stereo [hooking up two people with two microphones], and which microphones are most impervious to being knocked around. MESSAGE 7 Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2005 10:28:17 -0800 From: Lauren Asia Hall-Lew Hi, Here's just one site that has some seemingly useful information on microphones and other recording equipment: http://www.historicalvoices.org/oralhistory/mic-intro.html Further down the page, it says, about using a Marantz, that: "Unfortunately, the cost of a PC card capable of containing an hour of uncompressed audio is still prohibitively high." I'm guessing from all the positive things I've heard about the Marantz 660 and 670 that this isn't exactly true. But about how much should you expect to spend to capture a day's worth of uncompressed speech? (Assuming you have your laptop with you, and can download those files at the end of the day and reuse the cards each day...) Not that helpful, but something I've been curious about! cheers, Lauren MESSAGE 8 Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2005 14:04:37 -0500 From: "Maciej A. Baranowski" A 1GB CF card is less than $100 and holds a little over 4 hours of recording, with the PMD-670 set to mono and 32kHz sampling rate. M.