Olympus LS-3 or LS-12? (1 Viewer)

[timmyjones]

So as a hobby level entrant into the world of sound recording I purchased a Sennheiser MKE-300 off eBay and am now looking to get a recorder to go with it.

For my price range and decent quality I have narrowed it down to a olympus LS-3 or 12. What are people opinions on these recorders? Which one is better or is there another alternative that I should look into?

I mainly want to use this set up for 2 different situations, recording birds as they fly over at Spurn and targeting individual 'interesting' birds to record calls and produce sonograms. I plan on making a pistol grip in order to reduce handling noise.

I quite like the sound of the pre record buffer on the LS-3 as reaction timings are vital when a bird is flying over, however should I just have the mic set up recording all the time and then just edit it?

I know that the MK-66 is the mic of choice for bird recordings but I didn't want to spend that sort of money so I'm looking for advice on the recorder not the mic!

 

[HarryJ]

Hi,
both LS-3 and LS-12 are good. Both have a prebuffer. You can use additional SD memory cards in LS-12. This makes life easier in the sense that if your recoding is over 2 hours, then you may want more memory than the 2GB internal memory of the LS-3. Both should work with a MKE-300. If you can afford a bit more then you may want to consider the LS-100. This would bring you XLR connections making your in future ME66 addition trivial - or a good parabolic setup. I have a LS-100, and it is very good.

<QUOTE>I mainly want to use this set up for 2 different situations, recording birds as they fly over at Spurn and targeting individual 'interesting' birds to record calls and produce sonograms. </QUOTE>

Both systems work. I prefer to use continuous recording, and keep the recorder a bit further away so that my noise (talk, telescope or other instrument handling is not recorder). If a good bird flies over, you could set up a scheme where by you make a note in your notebook with time marked down or you shout at your distant mic two minutes later "pine grobeak" if one flew over and called. If you do point and shoot recording be sure to add after the bird is gone te relevant info species, location, date, time, e.t.c.

The MKE-300 is quite nice and compact.

Regards
HarryJ

 

[timmyjones]

Hi,
both LS-3 and LS-12 are good. Both have a prebuffer. You can use additional SD memory cards in LS-12. This makes life easier in the sense that if your recoding is over 2 hours, then you may want more memory than the 2GB internal memory of the LS-3. Both should work with a MKE-300. If you can afford a bit more then you may want to consider the LS-100. This would bring you XLR connections making your in future ME66 addition trivial - or a good parabolic setup. I have a LS-100, and it is very good.

<QUOTE>I mainly want to use this set up for 2 different situations, recording birds as they fly over at Spurn and targeting individual 'interesting' birds to record calls and produce sonograms. </QUOTE>

Both systems work. I prefer to use continuous recording, and keep the recorder a bit further away so that my noise (talk, telescope or other instrument handling is not recorder). If a good bird flies over, you could set up a scheme where by you make a note in your notebook with time marked down or you shout at your distant mic two minutes later "pine grobeak" if one flew over and called. If you do point and shoot recording be sure to add after the bird is gone te relevant info species, location, date, time, e.t.c.

The MKE-300 is quite nice and compact.

Regards
HarryJ

Cheers Harry, you can add extra mini-SD cards to the LS-3 so went for that option. Look forward to some experiments!

 

[timmyjones]

Bit of a blogpost showing my set up, the Olympus LS-3 capabilities and details on how to edit recordings might be of interest here

http://timsbirding.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/bullfinches-and-sound-recordings.html

 

[pshute]

Bit of a blogpost showing my set up, the Olympus LS-3 capabilities and details on how to edit recordings might be of interest here

http://timsbirding.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/bullfinches-and-sound-recordings.html

Your spectrogram shows the whole 0-20kHz range, even though you're looking at calls that are less than 4kHz, if I'm looking at the right ones. Have you tried zooming in vertically a bit to see if you can see more detail?

 

[timmyjones]

Your spectrogram shows the whole 0-20kHz range, even though you're looking at calls that are less than 4kHz, if I'm looking at the right ones. Have you tried zooming in vertically a bit to see if you can see more detail?

Thanks for pointing that out, had a play on Raven Lite and have posted again on my blog

http://timsbirding.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/sonograms.html

 

[pshute]

Thanks for pointing that out, had a play on Raven Lite and have posted again on my blog

http://timsbirding.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/sonograms.html

Yes, the edited one looks cleaner, but detail has been lost too. I think you can probably play with the spectrogram parameters of the original to fade out the background too, but I prefer more detail.

What would it look like if you zoomed even further, so the maximum frequency shown was 5kHz? Sometimes what look like flat lines can turn out to have a bit of a slope or upturned ends, etc, when you zoom in enough.

 

[timmyjones]

Will be uploading various recordings as I go along with this set up to here, for those interested

http://www.xeno-canto.org/contributor/GPNHEXKDXG