MF - House - Neighbor (2013-04-22)

[Audio]

This is the same couple as in this posting, it took me a couple of months to catch them again. the first recording was made with a mobile phone, now i have upgradet to a Olympus LS3. here is the link to the first recording:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3500

Date: 2013-04-22
Time: 23:45
Format: mp3
Device: Olympus LS3
Quality: 320kbps
Software: MP3DirectCut
Duration: 13:00 min
Size: 29,70 MB

turn the volume on. i think they started with him licking her. At min 3:40 she has her first loud orgasm and at 11:20 he is cumming.
the file was originally 45min but because there were long sequences of silence i had cut it the 13min. i have some question for the audio pros in here: do you think i should have activated the build-in low cut filter 100Hz (or 300Hz) because there is some background noise apart from me shuffling around. i have set the microphone sensivity to middle but maybe should have set it to high? the Olympus LS3 also has the possibility of zooming the micro, that means you could focus the micro to a point or widen its range. do you think this would have made any difference?

[yeppie]

Audio, I´m curious to listen tonight but to answer your question partly before I know the results of your settings:
On my LS5 I usually have the mic set to high sensitivity if it isn´t positioned right next to the noisemaking and to zoom if I have an idea which direction the sound will come from. I´m not sure about the low-cut filter though but would be interested in opinions.

[emmpet8]

First of all apologies for not posting anything in a long time, but circumstances have changed and I don't get as much comp time as I would like. I'll listen to the recording later, but in answer to part of the question here's my opinion. I'm not a sound pro though and don't know anything about the recorder, but think cutting the lowest frequencies is often a good idea. Whether it's a good idea to do it at the point of recording I do question.

I find you gain a lot and loose very little by cutting the higher and lower frequencies of nearly all recordings with a full frequency range. I usually listen to them in Adobe Audition, so have an automatic Graphic Equalizer setting that I apply before enjoying the sounds. From experimenting and for me, I would say 100 Hz isn't quite enough and at 300 Hz there's a risk of loosing some stuff. The settings I use are as follows.

Anything up to 125 Hz completely cut.

160 set at -9 dB.

From 200 up left at 0 dB.

So without knowing anything about the recorder I would say use the 100 cut if you want to do it at the point of recording, but better still, record as normal and quickly process with a graphic equalizer afterwards. As for me I'm always happy to get files as recorded, without any processing and then play with them a bit myself.

Hope that might add something and thanks very much for posting the recording. Looking forward to listening later.

[JulietH]

great orgasm - nice one

[Soundbite]

Nice orgasms for each. Thanks.

[Audio]

yeppie

i have now activated microphone sensivity high

emmpete
probably you are right that it is better to cut the 100Hz afterwards and not during the recording, so i will not use the low cut filter during the recording except there is a really annoying clima or ventilator.

[emmpet8]

yeppie

i have now activated microphone sensivity high

emmpete
probably you are right that it is better to cut the 100Hz afterwards and not during the recording, so i will not use the low cut filter during the recording except there is a really annoying clima or ventilator.

First, thanks for posting the audio as I've now listened and enjoyed it.

I think it's wise to record everything and process afterwards. I've had a look at the sound you refer to and to remove it by cutting would mean removing a lot of her vocals. I've attached some images from Adobe Audition to try and explain why. Never tried attaching images in this forum before, so hope they work.

"Waveform" is just that and doesn't show the sound you're talking about, but switch to the Spectral Frequency Display and you can see it running through the clip.

In case you've not looked at sound in a SFD the brightness of the colours represents the volume (yellow being loudest) and the vertical scale is the frequency they occur at.

"Spectral Frequency Display" is the picture of your clip. You can see the sound running along the bottom.

"SFD Zoom" I've zoomed in to the frequencies from 0 to about 950 Hz. You can see a lot of very low frequency noise at the bottom and the annoying ventilator noise in bands from about 250 Hz to 800 Hz.

"SFD Slightly Processed" Here's the picture after I deleted a couple of peaks, cut the highest and lowest frequencies and then normalized it. You can see the yellow along the very bottom has gone, but not the ventilator.

"SFD Climactic Moments Here's a zoomed in picture of their special moments from 11min 14sec to 11min 26sec. You can see the time along the top. Her sounds are the yellow areas around the 300 Hz mark and his are the ones above.

Hope that makes some sense and the images work.

[emmpet8]

The last two images.

[Audio]

thank you very much for your effort in analyzing my recording. i can only say, if i have known that my shuffling would be so discernable on the record, i would have keept my hands on the recorder alone haha...

[emmpet8]

thank you very much for your effort in analyzing my recording. i can only say, if i have known that my shuffling would be so discernable on the record, i would have keept my hands on the recorder alone haha...

made me laugh! Like the cutting of frequencies, maybe it's best to keep the hands on the recorder until later!!!! Hope all of what I said made some sense.

On the subject of the images, I've just looked at them and they are small, but if you click on them they do open to the size of your browser. I'll post more about Adobe Audition Spectral Frequency Display in the right section in coming days. It's a great tool if you want to work in detail on a clip. I also find it a fantastic way of listening to clips, as you can see the sounds coming!

[Audio]

i wanted to buy adobe audition but i have heard that it is now only via online abonoment available. is that true?

[sc0tt-uk]

I'm late to join in here, but I'd take a different approach.

In my experience, your microphone sensitivity, low cut, and recording level (manual or auto) are all very interactive with these Olympus recorders. Some examples of what I'm trying to describe follow:

First, let's cover low cut. There will never be anything desirable below 100 Hz when we're talking about human voices, and in terms of environment sounds all those low frequency rumbles do is mask the good stuff. In addition, if you're using auto for your recording levels, all that low end junk will be triggering the in built limiter on your recorder, so even when you cut those frequencies in post production you'll have some work to do to counteract the audio ducking. My view is that if you know for sure you're gonna get rid of those frequencies afterward anyway, don't bother bringing them along for the ride at all. I mention 100 Hz specifically as that's usually the least dramatic low cut option on Olympus devices. Tbh, unless you're recording through something solid (walls, doors with no discernible gap etc), I'd probably ramp it up to the 300 Hz setting, especially if you're working with the combination of the high microphone sensitivity and the auto recording level setting. When you've got that combination engaged, the less masking at the source the better.

Mic sensitivity - If it's a file that I don't intend to do much work on afterward, then sure, high will do a good job. If I know I'm going to put work in to clean things up and improve the audio, I usually go for middle. You'll get better results amplifying with a computer to crunch the underlying numbers and some meters in front of you if you like to work visually. I find that middle mic sensitivity gives me a good compromise between leaving myself with some head room but not having to do a ton of work fighting against the extra hiss that comes from amplification.

Recording level - A lot of what I wrote above hinges on this setting. As much as I hate the sound of auto-gain and similarly named functions, I still tend to roll with the punches and keep this one on unless I'm sure that the environment isn't going to throw up any surprises. In a straight choice between the sound of auto-gain and the sound of clipping, I'll take auto-gain every time. Distortion is bloody hard to get rid of, and even the pro plugins only do a half decent job to my ears. I find that backing the mic sensitivity down to middle means that the onboard compressor/limiter isn't going nuts, and the sound of auto-gain at work doesn't drive me quite so crazy.

Mic zoom - so far, I've heard nothing good come from this. As I understand it they use tricks with phase to simulate movement or changes in the arrangement of multiple mics. IMO, you don't want to fuck about with phase unless you know you're going to gain something from it or you've got a specific repair to make. In my tests, it didn't sound particularly convincing. I'd sooner switch to mono and/or use my body to block out sounds bleeding in as much as possible before I went with mic zoom. Really, if you want a super narrow pickup pattern, you're better off buying an external mic that has that.

Recording mode - unless storage space makes it impractical, always record in PCM, Wav or whatever your recorder calls it's uncompressed format. If you do any work on the file between recording and uploading here and you've recorded as mp3, you're going to re-encode the edited file before uploading. Stacked encoders sound bloody horrible. For the kind of stuff we're recording here, so long as you're careful with levels I don't see any advantages to going higher than 44.1 KHZ PCM, especially when you consider the amount of storage space the extra resolution would burn through.

So to sum up, my starting point for a recording like this (and most others) with an Olympus LS series device would be mic sensitivity on middle, some form of low cut (100 for sure, 300 if you're feeling brave and/or arent' heavily into your post production yet), auto for recording levels unless you know the target and surroundings well, and recording mode set to wav. If you've got no post production chops or you just want to get the action straight from your recorder to our eager ears, then mic sensitivity on high and the dreaded auto-gain will spit out something much closer to finished sounding.

I realise most of this completely contradicts what Emmpet8 has been saying. On paper he's not wrong, and when you're working with a consistent source, decent mics into a quality preamp then his advice is right on the money. Even if you're not working with any of that (these field recorders aren't really any of those things yet), his approach is still great so long as you've got the patience and skills to tidy up afterward the way he can. I have neither, so this is how I get usable results up up here with the least amount of time spent. Of course, as the quality of the components and DSP in the field recorders improve, this stuff is going to become less relevant. It's also worth keeping in mind that we're talking about small differences with most of this stuff. Yes, they do all add up to something significant in the end, but you've already crossed the threshold in terms of hardware quality where it's difficult to make a "bad" or "unfixable" recording, so don't drive yourself insane over these details. The more you use it, the more you'll get to know your device.

BTW, the actual audio in this thread is a great catch!

Sc0tt-UK

[emmpet8]

Mic zoom - so far, I've heard nothing good come from this. As I understand it they use tricks with phase to simulate movement or changes in the arrangement of multiple mics. IMO, you don't want to fuck about with phase unless you know you're going to gain something from it or you've got a specific repair to make. In my tests, it didn't sound particularly convincing. I'd sooner switch to mono and/or use my body to block out sounds bleeding in as much as possible before I went with mic zoom. Really, if you want a super narrow pickup pattern, you're better off buying an external mic that has that.

Some really interesting points by sc0tt-uk, but the bit regarding mic zoom made me realise it's something I've never thought about much before. Although I love sound, the main focus of my media work has been photography and more lately video. In optics zoom is almost standard and I do understand how it works. However sc0tt-uk's comments about mic zoom made me think about a small Sony mic I use and my lack of understanding of what mic zoom really is.

The mic is a Sony ECM-MS907 that I bought to be pocket sized and mainly for use with a Sony portable minidisk recorder, for capturing sound effects and interview work. This mic has a 90 and 120 degree setting, so I guess you call that zoom. I'd be really interested to know from sc0tt-uk's comments if I'm better off using it on the 120 setting? Not knowing anything about what mic zoom is, I've always thought that 90 would be the best setting in general. My rationale being, probably wrongly, that it wouldn't pick up extra unwanted sounds, particularly with interviews, or when aimed at a specific subject.

Needless to say, if I think there's a chance of capturing and sounds of passion from a certain location I've also used the 90 setting. I'd be really grateful for any advice, as I know nothing at all about mic zoom.

[sc0tt-uk]

Really, if you want a super narrow pickup pattern, you're better off buying an external mic that has that.

I'd be really grateful for any advice, as I know nothing at all about mic zoom.

So it turns out, neither do I

Doing some quick googling on the subject, I can't find any manufacturers who give away exactly how it works. Guess it's one of those "secret sauce" type technologies. I did however find a couple of things from reviews and forum posts written by people who appear to be much more learned than I which suggest I was right in thinking that it's based on calculated phase adjustment.

Quote about how Olympus employ the technology and a better description of what it sounds like than I gave:
"Perhaps by way of compensation for the fact that its stereo mics are fixed in position, the LS10 employs a technology called DiMagic Virtual Microphone to "record by focusing on sound from any direction". This can only be used when recording 16-bit, 44.1kHz WAV files, and is activated by selecting one of five options from the Zoom Mic menu (can you tell that Olympus make cameras?). At one end of the spectrum there's Wide, which makes the apparent width of what you're recording much broader. I found this very effective for some ambient sounds such as passing traffic, where you want exaggerated movement within the stereo field, but I'd be hesitant about using it for music: there's an obvious hole in the centre of the field, and recordings made with the Wide setting are not at all mono-compatible. At the other end of the spectrum, the Zoom setting records mono, but somehow matrixes the two microphones to produce a more directional pickup pattern. DVM settings can't be changed or undone after the fact, so it's probably best to leave them switched off unless you're very confident they can deliver the results you're after."

And something based on Zoom products, which have a different mic arrangement, but still valid:
"Zoom microphones use a pair of cardioid capsules that are both forward facing with one directly behind the other. The rear microphone is wired up so that it is out of phase with the front microphone. As long as the distance between the two capsules is substantially bigger than half the wavelength of the sound, both microphones will contribute to the signal recorded from sounds that are in front of the microphones. When used "zoomed in", sounds that are arriving from the side will reach both microphones at exactly the same time and will produce a signal in the rear microphone that "cancels out" the signal from the front microphone. When used "zoomed out", the rear microphone is switched off and the front microphone works as an ordinary cardioid microphone. To cope with low frequencies (long wavelength sounds), some fancy electronics are used that shift the phase of the rear microphone so that it is less than 180 degrees out of phase with the front microphone. There is an additional problem in that a certain amount of "comb filtering" will occur causing a boost or cut of frequencies that have half wavelengths that are exact multiples of the distance between the microphones. I presume that this could also be compensated for electronically."

The maths to get this to work with two capsules positioned at 90 degrees made my head hurt, but suffice to say I A) I don't like the sound of it and B) I'd avoid it purely because it can't be undone if applied at the source like this.

For me, the big question now is whether setting my Olympus to record in mono in one menu is actually any different than setting mic zoom to narrow in another. I haven't checked out the differences visually yet, but going on ears alone, I think there is a difference, and I'm pretty sure I prefer the former. That's good news in my book.

Re your ECM-MS907, I'd say that you're right to use that set the way you have it, as the capsules are physically aligned at 90 degrees. 120 will give you that fake widened affect with the hole in the center of your stereo field. A 30 degree change in positioning is quite a significant amount of movement physically, so to fake that with only a tiny DSP chip crunching the numbers, it's got to be pretty crude surely.

Sorry Audio, we seem to have geeked all over your thread

Sc0tt-UK

[emmpet8]

Thanks to Sc0tt-UK for all the research and useful information about mic zooming, it really helps. I think it would be a great thing to post in the Know-How section. Apologies also to Audio for hijacking the thread.