Today, almost on an impulse when I found myself on a very still day in the deserted and quietest countryside park I know, I recorded about 5 minutes of birdsong using my humble Zoom H2essenial. This isn't about that recorder so much as about any reasonable modern portable recorder these days - that's just the one I had in my bag.
The birdsong was actually more or less inaudible to my bare ears while the recording progressed. I was a bit annoyed the birds were being unhelpful. But when I used Audition to first play the recording unchanged, and then normalised (+30dB), I was staggered to hear that birds were actually singing all the time, and I could even hear the decay of the reverberation of their calls once the gain was raised that much. Yes, I could hear a fair bit of background noise instead of the previous near-silence, but it sounded to me like environmental noise rather than system noise. It sounded "out there" rather than "in there".
This was a good test showing how raising digital gain when recording in 32 bit float these days is pointless - all possible detail was actually in there on the almost flat waveform - but also that it's hard to imagine the circumstances where system noise would actually be a real world problem. Certainly not in the tapers section at a rock concert. This noisy world's environments are the problem, not the recorders!
I put my experiment together in a YouTube video on my unmonetised channel. If anyone cares to check it out and tell me that I'm totally wrong, here's the link.
https://youtu.be/eHCQG3hBYrY
Topic: Is system noise a thing of the past, which can usually just be ignored? (Read 203 times)