Recording Device

Most likely you will not start with an analog recording device. Even for field recordings under extremely difficult conditions you will find affordable digital and portable recording devices. Basically you may use any kind of digital recording device; however, we recommend using a hardware that lets you store the signal on a storage medium on-line without an extra copying step whenever possible to avoid unnecessary work load. Here are some basic hardware options you have for on-site recordings:

• Record into a workstation
  Use a high quality A/D card to avoid disturbance from the host computer. You may improve the results by changing the slot and find the best position of your card with the lowest noise. In most cases standard cards will not do the job because they provide only two channels. But there are quite a number of affordable 4- and 8-channel cards available.

  If the recording host has to be located in the room where the recording takes place, try to get an acoustically insulated chassis and silent, low spinning hard drives.

• Record into a laptop
  Not a good idea. Most laptops produce severe noise on the A/D input. Test the A/D input carefully before buying the laptop.^5.7

  If you want to use a laptop, record via a USB audio device (e.g. Griffin Technology's iMic). An alternative without laptop is to use a standalone digital recording device (e.g. Nomad Jukebox). Such a device can record up to 4 hours of uncompressed audio data onto its internal hard disk and then allows a rapid transfer of data to the computer via USB or FireWire.

• Record on a DAT tape recorder
  Many people out there still do that because the quality is outstanding. Also, you'll automatically have a backup medium (the tape), if something happens to your recorded data later (and as Murphy says: ``What can go wrong will go wrong!'').
  On the other hand you then have to copy your digitized data from DAT to your computer. Most DAT players have a digital port (either electronic or optical) that can be connected to special cards (e.g. TripleDAT). Then you have your data in interleaved blocks and with 48 kHz (or 44.1 kHz) sampling frequency. You will most likely then filter them digitally and downsample to a suitable sampling frequency for speech.
  All this takes time and man power from your project budget.

For larger setups (more than 4 microphones and possibly several feedback channels for simulated background noise) you might consider a semi-professional music mixer to handle all the amplifying stuff.