This is a wonderful recording. Thank you. Very impressed with your noise reducing programme...is it expensive?

animals

This track was recorded on the Silver Bank, Dominican Republic, during the Conscious Breath Adventures 2012 humpback whale season. Every season some 3,000-5,000 whales gather to court, mate and give birth, offering an excellent opportunity to see and here them. Conscious Breath Adventures holds a limited permit allowing us to take guests to swim with the whales, allowing us to literally immerse ourselves in the song. It is a bone-shaking experience. To get the best effect, play this over your home stereo system at high volume!                                                                                                     To learn more about the humpback whales visit www.ConsciousBreathAdventures.com

Humpback Whale Song 2012, © Conscious Breath Adventures

testing my new 'd-series' hydrophone design (available from June 2012 from hydrophones.blogspot.com) against the DPA8011's. 

first section are the DPA's then the d-series !

The DPA's are no longer in production but did used to cost over £1000 each & if you want one now you'd be lucky to find them below £2000 each second hand. 

So, my d-series will be priced around £60 each & though I say it myself i'm very pleased with the way they stacked up in comparison with the DPA's. 

The DPA's have a stronger signal as they have a built in additional pre-amp, however the most interesting difference is the way the two hydrophone designs pick up some of the same sounds but at different levels. Indeed the DPA's seem not to pick up at all lots of the subtle sounds the d-series do. The DPA's seem to focus on the higher end sounds & the d-series cover a wider range of sounds more equally. I know i'm biased but I much prefer the sound of the d-series, which to my ears capture a more diverse, richer & more complex sound world.

Another interesting fact is that the DPA's had hardly any low frequency response. I tried applying various low pass filters on the Sound Devices recorder to them & none made any difference to the sound. This was a surprise indeed & i'm somewhat puzzled by that.

Both recordings were made directly into the SD7 series recorder, with gain levels equal & in the same location: 2 hydrophones of each model either side of a small wooden pier on an inlet on the east coast of sweden in May 2012.

Of course, the d-series are my design so as I said earlier I am biased, but lets just say that i'm very pleased by the way they perform next to the high-end DPA's.

£2000 + for a DPA8011 (if you can find one)
or
£60 for a JrF d-series 

hmmm....

Hydrophone tests d-series vs dpa8011

Natterjack Toad recorded in France by WSRS member Simon Elliott.

Natterjack toads are claimed to be Europe's noisiest amphibian, with the male call audible over several kilometres. Natterjacks are found in southwest and central Europe, but are rare in Britain. Being poor swimmers, they drown in deep water if they can't get ashore. Short limbs mean they can't leap very far, and usually only do so as a startle response before going into their normal running gait.

Natterjack Toad Epidalea calamita

Recorded with 2 B&K 4006s and Sound devices 788T
Traffic noise reduced using Izotope Rx2 pro. (Remarkable wee programme!)

The Inhabitants of my Rhododendron bush!

Dipper recorded by WSRS member Simon Elliott. Dippers are small, stout, short-tailed, short-winged, strong-legged birds. They have a characteristic bobbing motion when perched beside the water, giving them their name. Dippers’ calls are loud and high-pitched, being similar to calls made by other birds on fast rivers; the call frequencies lying within a narrow range of 4.0-6.5 kHz, well above the torrent noise frequency of <2 kHz. Dippers also communicate visually by their characteristic dipping or bobbing movements, as well as by blinking rapidly to expose their pale upper eyelids as a series of white flashes in courtship and threat displays.

White-throated Dipper Cinclus cinclus

I was tucked up soundly at six in the morning letting the recorder do the work and when I got around to logging the recordings it was quite a nice dawn chorus but I've got lots of those. This extract starts with a nesting pigeon in an overgrown Leylandii hedge behind the mics. Here we go again, muttering jackdaws, the neighbour's sheep, yet another noisy wren - and then then DRRRRR right in front of the garden mics. "Garden" is a bit of an exotic description. It's a steep slope with a dozen large trees and lots of impenetrable wildlife habitat, but the deer can get though it.

So could this woodpecker. It tried out one tree after another and I've made guesses which tree it was bashing. Then it was gone as quickly as it arrived. There is a sequel however, as I discovered two days later when the woodpecker started on the Big Beech.

DR1000_2270=28=31 Stereo MKH-416's into SQN and Tascam DR-100 
...

The Inhabitants of my Rhododendron bush!

Phil Cunningham

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Peter Annear

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