About field recordings (2)

After my adventures in the pre-digital era described here came a long hiatus so that when I returned to field-recordings the digital time had arrived (for a while, really). The advantages of digital recordings are numerous and easily outrun the advantages of analogue equipment when it comes to field-recordings. It is light, small, easy to handle, has not mechanical parts that can break down (provided you work with flash memories rather than discs). It is durable, gets you a lot of mileage out of batteries and shows little wear. So, with little money to spend, I bought the Olympus VN-480. It costs an enormous 110 Euros quite a few years back. Below you can see what it got you that time:

Lovely VN-480

It is extremely easy to operate. Just put two AAA-batteries in the back and you are ready to go and record all those sounds.

Truth be told: it was awful. As in: really awful. Oh yes, it was light and small and all that but the best it could manage was 22050Hz, 88kbps, 4 bit, mono. (just) Good enough to dictate a letter to your secretary but that is where it stops. Anything it recorded sounded plastic, with an overemphasis on mids and highs and total absence of low. It also made a lot of noise by itself and had the tendency to add distortion to any complex sound that was recorded.

Nevertheless, it was useful for me as I learned how to deal with digital recordings (especially when it came to polishing sounds back at home). And I did most of the field-recordings on 8pmcityscapes using this cheap machine. For example in this recording that I made in London and that features prominently in the song ‘Streetpreacher’. The distortion actually adds something to the recording. Still, the Olympus is now gathering dust as I found a replacement. More about that later.