Audio Hardware Review

I really enjoyed building my microphones by hand. I’ve always enjoyed building things whether it is cabinets or a set for a play (I was in stage crew in high school). I also like that I wasn’t using some high tech piece of equipment and just making due with what I have. That being said, soldering is way harder than I thought it would be. When I watched a demo on building the microphones and it said to solder the wires I just though “No problem, seems easy enough.” After the first twenty minutes or so I quickly learned that soldering is easier said than done. My microphones themselves worked pretty well on my Drift walk I thought. I had some wind noise here and there, but it was a windy day so I’ll cut them some slack. I was able to capture the overall ambience fairly well and I’m happy with the way my recordings of them turned out. I didn’t try to record many extreme close-ups on my Drift, but the ones I did try out were sometime distorted or weren’t particularly clean recordings due to all the background noises the microphones also picked up. I personally don’t know that much about what kind of recording equipment is out there, but my ideal microphone and recorder set up would have ultra wind screens so that there wouldn’t be any interference on the recording. The recording device would have an easy to use interface and mic volume could be easily controlled.

The MiniDisc recorder is infuriating; I would completely hate it if it didn’t make decent recordings. The interface can be very confusing at times. The biggest complaint I have, and I’m sure it’s pretty high on everyone else’s list too, is having to change the record volume to manual every single time you want to take a new recording. This is actually the first device I’ve ever used to solely record sound. I’ve used a common camcorder and extracted audio off of that, and the microphone on my Mac. Using the camcorder is actually easier to use, however it feels like a waste of tape when you’re just using it to record audio. As for the Mac, it’s not the greatest microphone it has built in. It’s very easy to distort the sound and generally it records a rather low quality of audio. I just want a recorder that is easy to use and gets high quality recordings, is that too much to ask?

I edited my audio on the freeware application Audacity. I’d never used the program before this drift, but I found it pretty easy to use even for someone with as limited audio knowledge as myself. I chose to use Audacity mostly on recommendation from others as well as knowing its reputation as a pretty good audio editing program (as far as getting things for free go). I will probably continue to use it on following drifts. I found the interface simple to understand, although I didn’t play around with all of the effects too much because I wasn’t sure what they would do. Then again, if I don’t know what they do I should experiment to find out so I can later use it to my advantage.