It's been an interesting day... where I stuffed up two recordings.
The one relevant to this discussion was my first attempt to record a live music show using the stereo Lark A1 wireless mics with a mobile phone to which the USB-C receiver was connected. It was a jazz event featuring the pianist Hiromi performing with an amplified string quartet. The hall concerned (Hamer Hall Melbourne) seats 2500, and it's a very strict venue when it comes to recording and so on. You don't get searched on the way in, but they do walk through the hall before each event carrying illuminated signs saying 'No video, no photos' to ensure people keep their phones in their pockets. And they watch from the back of the hall to make sure nobody does anything they shouldn't. But the notices don't say "no audio recording"....
So I fixed the two mics into the front pockets at chest height of my light jacket, mics inside, tiny magnets visible outside but they almost look like buttons. I did that and configured everything at home, an hour before the event started, and then started the recording running on a phone when I was at a quiet spot in the foyer. Then I put the phone, screen off, into another pocket of the jacket.
But - when I got home, I discovered that the AI noise reduction feature of the Lark A1 outfit had been triggered! The pre-concert noise in the hall sounded awful, super processed. Happily, the system seemed intelligent enough to realise that the music performance didn't count as noise, so it was relatively ok - but not totally. However, I was able to judge the playback compared with what I had just experienced in the hall, and it wasn't bad at all, NR excepted. Basically it was the sound of an amplified music performance recorded from the back row of a large hall - which was where I was seated. I noted when listening live that the PA system in combination with the hall acoustic did not display a totally flat frequency response - for instance, some notes of the piano were prominent compared with others. Not drastic, but when playing back, I still heard that, but wasn't particularly aware of any uneven response in the mics themselves. Low frequencies sounded fine, but a bit of HF boost will be necessary to counter the placement of mics inside the jacket pockets, whose material is thin but it's still not ideal.
So how did the noise reduction get turned on, and how can I avoid that in future? The problem is that the receiver, plugged into the phone, has a small non-recessed button at the bottom, which if pressed turns on or off the NR. And the mics too each have a single button which does the same thing (and several other things). I need to devise a way to make that receiver button unpressable. When it is pressed, it does change the colour of the tiny LED lights on the receiver and mics, but of course when trying to be stealthy, I don't want to be checking the state of those lights. Ideally the system software would have a "settings lock" option - but it doesn't.
Anyway, despite this problem, I remain of the view that tiny wireless mics feeding a phone are a viable stealth recording option, with a bit of imagination about placing the mics on one's person and using the phone discretely. The basic quality is (to me) perfectly acceptable. I may make a video about this tale of woe, with a brief excerpt from the recording. It might interest a few people. We'll see.
The first disaster of the day was when I recorded a thunderstorm using my humble Zoom H2essential. It was a great storm, lots of very heavy rain starting from the odd drip, and no wind. But when I went out into the garden where I had placed the recorder under an umbrella, and tried to replay what I thought was going to be an excellent Field recording, I discovered that when I popped the wind muff over the recorder having set it going, I had accidentally pressed the pause button. So my half-hour storm recording lasted... 3 seconds. A day of wrong button presses. Tomorrow may be better...
Topic: Retitled -Rode & Hollyland wireless mics for stealthy binaural recording (Read 151063 times)