On Mar 10, 1:14*pm, "William R. Walsh" wrote:
Hi!

What should I use?

How about a cheap tape recorder? You could pick up a battery operated
unit very inexpensively secondhand (and for not much more brand new).
It's cheap, simple and a (still) large installed base of tape players
means you can play the recording almost anywhere.

What you really want to do is look at the microphone you are using. I
think you'll want a microphone with an omnidirectional pickup pattern
and the ability to pick up sounds from afar.

Unidirectional and "noise canceling" microphones are probably not
going to work well for this application.

William

Thank you for your reply. I fear you are correct that the front end
is most important - the mike and preamp.

In defense of digital vs mechanical, the Sony has 1 1/2 hr of
'perfect' MP3 and more than 340 hours of plain recording [even speech
recognition software] and the design is supposed to be for individual,
conference room, or that tiny sound from the corner. However, the
playback sounds more like excessive tape hiss. My wife said 'typical
sony' ...she once had a walkman that was no end of trouble. Also,
heads up, comes with CD Sound Editor software and a DVD with Speech
Recognition SW, both will only install on OS of Win2000 or better.

As you may know, picking up high frequency is no problem so this
recorder apparently shifts everything into the treble. can't hear
thumps and bumps, but the slightest scritch/scritch is gangbusters.
For that reason may not be the right choice.

Apologies for not being scientific, so try again. Apparently the Sony
ICD SX700D is inadequate in the low frequency spectrum, below 300Hz,
probably deems that not very important because that's adequate for
speech. However, the higher spectrum where ruslting of paper resides,
the recorder appears to enhance that sound bandwidth. As a result, I
fear the unit will not fulfill the function I need.

I just realized I was playing the sound back using the built in 1 inch
diameter speaker. Duh! Will try using earphones with better fidelity
to see if the lower spectrum exists. I also have the capability of
storing as a 16 bit .wav file, so I can do some very esoteric
manipulations using a Matlab clone, octave. I'll see if I can find
flatness of the recording system and the noise floor of the recorder.
At least I'll find the noise density coefficient.

Robert