Topic: Advice for lavalier mic for scientific research

[joljols]

Hi, I hope you can help me with the following. I am a researcher studying individual recognition in birds and am planning to do a project to look at what age, if at all, chicks can recognize their parents compared to other conspecifics. I have a population of birds that use my nestboxes and am planning to record calls from the parents near the nestbox and play them back in the nestbox at a later stage. I want to do this with as many nestboxes as possible and am aiming for around 30 nestboxes. I am therefore looking to buy a small lavalier kind of mic that I can place at the nestbox. The recording has to be as natural as possible to be able to pick up any differences in calls between individuals, but we would have to buy multiple mics to not have to move them around all the nestboxes too much. I looked at a couple options and saw the lavalier mics range from say 10 pounds to hundreds of pounds, however it remains totally unclear what the differences are and which one would be ideal for my set-up. I hope you can help me with this and suggest some mics. My total budget is maximum 350 pounds I would say, which could mean 30 very cheap ones or one very expensive one...
Thanks.

[MIQ]

Hi JolJols

Do you have to be able to record all the nest boxes simultaneously?

What will you use for a recorder?

What will you use to play back the calls in the nest box?

Miq

[joljols]

Hi,
No, we will have multiple recorders. We will be using PMD660's and am now comparing 661 to 620 to get another 2-4. THe only difference between those two is
PMD661: EXTERNAL MIC IN L/R: XLR (1:GND, 2:HOT, 3:COLD), Input sensitivity: 1.2 mVrms /4.2k ohms
PMD620: MIC IN L/R: 1/8" stereo mini jack, Input sensitivity: 12 mV rms /30kohms
Does that mean that the PMD620 will have much higher impedance and will therefore be much noisier?
I will use a small speaker that is often used in scientific playback experiments.
I hope you have some ideas.
Thanks

[MIQ]

Hi JolJols

I'm not familiar with what is available in the UK but I would guess a few inexpensive lav mic that could run off plug in power might be fine. Having a perfectly flat freq response is not a huge concern given the fact that you will be playing the tracks back over a small single cone speaker.

It's hard to tell what you need from the info you've posted.

Will you be able to get the mics close to the parents?  How close together are the nest boxes?  Is being able to conceal the mics (small size) important?  Do you think you will need the mics to resist the weather?

Miq