I can be in record in a matter of seconds!
Recording audio in reflector 3 portable#
Hence, my minimalist, rapid response kit, illustrated below is light, portable and very fast to set up. One of the most common problems with wildlife recording is that quite often the perfect recording opportunity comes up without warning.
As you creep up with your microphone the subject simply flies off or runs away! …….Or in the case of dangerous wild animals it may be the sound recordist who does the running! The parabolic dish enables the sound recordist to record from a safe distance without risk of disturbing the subject or getting eaten! Using an unmounted microphone there are many wildlife recording situations in which it is simply not possible for the sound recordist to get close enough to achieve a good signal to noise ratio. For that reason I would suggest that the parabolic dish is at its best when recording an isolated single subject.įrequency/ Directional Response Plot for a typical parabolic reflector for wildlife recording This can be difficult if for instance the subject is moving around in a group of birds. However, given the narrow beam characteristics of the dish, one thing that the recordist should bear in mind is that if the subject moves off axis the tonal quality of the sound will change. Even with a modest sized reflector, the on-axis sound of the chosen subject is greatly magnified without adding any of the hiss and hum associated with electronic amplification. The forward gain of a reflector is defined as the difference in output level between a microphone which is reflector-mounted compared to the same microphone unmounted. A 1m dish will give 20db (x10) gain to frequencies above 300Hz. For the modern wildlife recordist a somewhat smaller portable dish is something of a compromise! For a narrow forward beam of 10 degrees a 60cm diameter dish gives around 14db (x5) gain to frequencies above 500Hz. The enormous concrete military dishes of the 1930’s were often 30ft in diameter or more, enabling them to detect the lowest frequencies of an aircraft engine over huge distances. The frequency response and polar pattern are a function of the size of the dish used.
CLICK HERE to share in the joy!Ī parabolic reflector has one significant advantage over other sound pick-up devices: it is a noiseless acoustic amplifier. The author recording birds in the trees down at the bottom of the garden. an omni or a cardioid microphone, mounted facing inwards, at the central focal point of a portable parabolic dish. In the post war years with the rise of television and the increasing popularity natural history broadcasts on both wireless and TV, sound recordists were quick to adopt the parabolic microphone i.e. (That is if you could hear anything above the sound of your mates laughing their heads off!) The information could then be relayed to anti-aircraft batteries.Ī ‘stereo’ device like this could be used to pick up activity in enemy positions and provide early warning of attack. This would enable the listener in the control room beneath the dish to calculate the direction of the incoming aircraft. The listening ‘trumpet’ seen on this dish could be rotated to find the strongest signal. However, the whole project was abruptly abandoned in 1938 with the invention of Radar! The largest of these structures could detect aircraft at a distance of 25 miles. During the 1930s, in the run-up to World War 2, a number of these enormous concrete parabolic reflectors appeared along the South coast of England and at other strategic locations. The first ‘sound mirror’ was erected in Maidstone in April 1915. With the advent of aerial warfare in the First World War, the British military started developing acoustical devices to provide early warning of incoming enemy aircraft. The notion of using a parabolic reflector to pick up sounds from afar has been around for many years.
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