The equipment you recommend seems to be largely for studio use and is not amenable to easy (read: almost daily) portability. I suppose this is a natural consequence of seeking high quality equipment. I don't have the luxury of owning a piano at home and so must use practice rooms available to me. Some suggestions for what equipment might be the lesser of available evils would help someone like me. Would going with a digital device (DAT or Minidisk) help to avoid wow and flutter? How about miking in a small room with marginal acoustics? This could be valuable info for many undergrad music students, who may also be on a limited budget.

Thanks, Nathan Dalleska

-- Nathan Dalleska (nathand@caltech.edu), January 28, 1999

Answers

Easy portability is one of the very nice features of the Sony TCD-D5M portable cassette deck which I recommend highly, so I'm not sure that I follow your meaning. For the other equipment, a microphone is a microphone; in terms of portability, that is. Some of the microphones that can sit on the floor eliminate the need for a stand & a boom.

Yes, any digital recorder will be good in stability of pitch ("low wow & flutter") but there are no such recorders that I can recommend at anything like the price range we're talking about.

By the way, I've tested a Lot of equipment that I don't mention; all the other stuff was unusable!

In a small room, or even a moderate-sized room, so-called 'figure-8' microphones have advantages that are beyond our scope to describe. Unfortunately, no inexpensive figure-8 mikes are made. The cheapest one I know of is about $500 and its sound quality renders it non-recommendable.

I have designed a very inexpensive system of mike+recorder which I've been trying to get some major mfrs. to make -- with no luck so far. It puzzles me, because I think the market would be in the millions.

Hope this helps and clarifies things.

-- James Boyk (boyk@cco.caltech.edu), January 28, 1999.