Hello.  So one thing you all may not know about me is that I have always been a sound guy.  My online gaming nickname is usually Hifiguy if that tells you anything.  A long time ago, I used to be heavily involved in doing live sound for theater and other live events.  After doing that for a while I got into HiFi audio sales and installations doing huge theater systems for people.  So needless to say I have always had a thing for audio equipment.

Since i started in this group I have always pushed us to have better and better audio equipment. A while back I did a lot of reserch and determined that the zoom h2 was the best devices for us to use from a bang for the buck standpoint as well as just audio quality.  Lately I have been wanting to step up our audio gear.  With the addition of one of our newer members Tom, we have been using his soundboard to place microphones around during investigations and that has really been a wonderful new advantage for us in audio.  With this sort of system we can quickly and easily listen to audio around the entire building or investigation area all at the same time to rule out different questionable audio clips.  This has really made things so much easier.  The downsides are that this device stores audio on its internal hard drive and it can only record 4 channels at a time.

Even before Tom came on board I have been looking hard for better audio equipment that we can use in this manner and for the longest time i have not been able to find anything that really fits what we need with a good price point.  I had found quite a few devices but most of them were severe overkill and very expensive.  Recently I found a new device that I think we are going to buy as soon as we can raise some money to do so.  The device is the zoom audio R16 seen here on Amazon.  It will allow us to record 8 channels at one time and can link two R16’s together so that we can record 16 channels at the same time.  This is what I am wanting to do so that we can have 2 mics at each camera from our dvr system.  The only issue I see is that we want to try and go to a 16 channel DVR system and when we do that I will want even more audio recording devices but That should be ok, It will just take forever to set up lol.

If anyone has any other suggestion for audio devices that you think I should look at, please let me know.  The requirements for me are to record 16 channels at minimum, in a digital way so that we can review the audio inside of the computers in adobe audition or adobe sound booth (for us mac people).  I don’t care about eq’s at all since i want all audio coming in as natural as possible.  I would want the ability to adjust the volume and gain of the mic just to be sure I am capturing as much audio as possible.  I look forward to your comments.

Shaun

This entry was posted on Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at 10:39 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.