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http://www.core-sound.com/jeck...
(Disc microphone)

I have no doubt at all hundreds of people can actually witness a real UFO from another world and nobody would care or believe it. It would drown under the noise of Venus, aircraft sightings, weather, flares, hoaxes and accounts of those not exactly operating on all thrusters.

Most of the UFO stories Area 51 included are nonsense but there were always a few interesting jems..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You can do that already (just add some linux nerdery): grab a cheap room correction mic and a bit of Free Software. I don't think it can help with speaker placement, unfortunately. There are spatial microphones intended to be used with an ambisonic mixing system, but they are pretty pricey. I kind of wonder how hard it would be to adapt room correction to deal with speaker placement too (I hear "very difficult" and "hope you paid attention in diff eq").

Anyone got any more?

How about "World's first"?

Also, this thing is so bleeding edge that it has a button to select if the mono mic is the left or right channel.

WTF?

I'm an audio geek, and when I think of a high def microphone for mobile computing, I think of something like: http://www.core-sound.com/TetraMic/1.php

No, I'm not affiliated with those guys at all, I just stumbled across that mic a week ago or so and thought it was cool. More of an interesting worlds first than this POS mic.

Nope. Handheld DAT's have been around for a while. And now this:

http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/MicroTrack24 96-main.html

And this:

http://www.core-sound.com/pdaudio_system/1.php

(Yes, yes, bootlegging's naughty, blah, blah, blah.)

I've been able to get reliably decent boots on my ancient (as in, bought in '98) Sharp MiniDisc, even considering how lossy ATRAC is. By clipping the mics to the ends of the bows of my glasses -- i.e., an inch away from my ear canals -- I get a recording that's damned near exactly what I heard live. Using my iPod instead would be ideal. AFAICT, the recording wouldn't be compressed, the bit- and sample-rates are vastly higher, I'd be able to extract it digitally by mounting the device as a disk and venue security probably wouldn't look twice at an iPod.

I think I know what I'm doing this weekend.

one thing to watch out for, in spdif output cards, is that MANY internally resample ALL data at 48k. this will alter the bitstream of a true 44.1 file if you try to diff it of what you see on the wire vs what is on disk.

sound blasters and their ilk are famous for this.

the envy24 chip is known to be bit-accurate. what you send is what you get. m-audio has these cards.

another good 'musician quality' (bit accurate) card is one that uses the 8738 chip. its cheap and very common.

I think it was M$ (I may be wrong) who first defined the internal audio architecture to be 48k sample rate. not sure if this was to foil those who cared about bit-accurate 44.1 content. it seems suspicious to me. ie, "lets not let consumers get direct bit-for-bit access to 44.1 streams. let them get digital, but a RESAMPLED digital, so our copyright folks 'feel' better". I may be totally off, here, though.

at any rate, assume your cheapie card WILL be a 48k style card. unless you know for sure its bit-accurate.

one place to check is an old time vendor of digital audio and taping supplies: http://www.core-sound.com/

they have 'pda audio' stuff that is supposed to be bit-accurate.

PDA's do it.
iRiver's do it.
iPod's running linux seem to be able to do it.

Stupid hardware crippling! It's pathetic!

The poster asked if anyone needs 2GB on a PDA ... obviously not a big live audio fan :)

Core Sound offers a PDA based digital audio recording system, with studio-quality 24/192 recording capability, based on CF. It basically plugs right into your IPAQ ... and it supports Linux!

Check it out! An excellent tool for capturing any kind of audio, really. Includes optical inputs and all that!

The poster asked if anyone needs 2GB on a PDA ... obviously not a big live audio fan :)

Core Sound offers a PDA based digital audio recording system, with studio-quality 24/192 recording capability, based on CF. It basically plugs right into your IPAQ ... and it supports Linux!

Check it out! An excellent tool for capturing any kind of audio, really. Includes optical inputs and all that!

I'm a long time 'dat-head' (from back in the early 90's). and lately I've heard of an attempt, using a linux-based iPaq, to create a pda-based digital spdif bit-for-bit accurate digital audio recorder. with the goal of making DAT obsolete.

DAT is far from the idea medium. the infamous 'buzzsaw' diginoise from dirty or misaligned heads, from using thinner 90meter tapes instead of the more standard thickness 60meter ones, etc, etc. getting bit-accurate results from DAT is not due to the spdif side of things, its purely the physics of the high rpm tape head drum and the cheapness in the manufacture of something that needs a very high level of precision. and of course you also have to do regular maintenance on the system to keep it clean and aligned.

if you can take the tape part out of DAT, it would be fine. oh, and extend it from 2 hours to something much longer (with no 'tape flips').

the project page that I found has a pda sized expansion card that allows you to import and export digital audio via the spdif protocol. if this system works (I've not personally seen it yet), it could mean that we can finally take the physical problems of the DAT drive out of the live recording loop.

suppose you have a wireless card as your 'storage' (think remote nfs) device. you can go to shows and capture a live digital feed (if you're lucky enough to know the soundboard guy) then remotely transmit the data via nfs/802.11 to your fileserver in your car, in the parking lot. running on the car battery, for reliability. sounds pretty darn cool to me..

I think the card that the core-sound device was based on is the VxPocket, which you can buy today and will work on laptops. so if you don't -need- a pda sized recorder, you can bring a laptop (and 80gig drives are currently available for 2.5" drives) and capture that spdif stream directly to local storage.

finally, it looks like there is hope for live recording enthusiasts, with hard-disk based reliability (hey, compared to tape, HD is heaven).

A key difference: the Nomads have digital inputs, while the iPods will only have analog inputs (from what I've read so far). So if you're wanting to record from a digital source, the iPod requires an extra step: D-to-A, then A-to-D.

One real world use for the Nomad's digital input is for very-high-quality recording -- check out this A-D converter. The quality of this would far exceed the iPod's built-in A-D converter.

The whitepaper shows that the 5500 can only record at 22khz using the mic input. Is this a device limitation, or software? Because I really want to use this when it becomes available (which will use the CF slot for input and a mic jack on the add-on itself), but it's not going to be worth it if the highest sampling rate available is 22khz :( Does anyone know anything?

Chris

I have been using the Roland (Edirol) UA-30 with similar features (optical/coax/analog in/out, plus a 2-channel mixer, jacks for guitar & microphone & headphone with a volume dial) for a couple of years. Powered by the USB connector, it needs nothing extra & is very light. I use it with the 7-pin Datman adapter cables from Core Sound to transcribe DAT tapes.

They recently reissued it as the Edirol UA-3 and added a more upscale 1/3 rack desktop model, the UA-5.

There have also been a stream of no-brand import USB sound devices from Taiwan over the last couple of years, but finding one when you needed it could be difficult.

Based on past performance, Creative's product will probably be less than perfect, but it'll be nice to have another option.

For the person who asked about Firewire - Stereo audio bitrates are fine for USB, you just need to have a little buffering in the device. I think the reason nobody's bother to put a 1394 chipset in an external sound box is that if you have Firewire you probably already have decent sound. This may change, or with USB 2.0 it may not.