stonehart
Paranormal Adept
This is a response to the EVP and I-phone thread that has been going.
Hopefully I am not the only full time sound engineer here in this forum [fingers crossed] but here are some of my thoughts on the subject from a technical point of view when it comes to why you should use a unit with no moving parts and no phone attached.
Ok well to start with I will be blunt.
Not meaning to sound negative but I have been a sound engineer for 17 years now and in all that time I have not once heard anything that I could not explain as cross talk, punch through, dirty tape, interference, RF faults [radio bleed], bad earth, or a simple PCM glitch [digital artefacts etc PCM means Pulse code modulation to those who don’t know].
In my professional opinion I would not trust small hand held analogue recording units not to pick up RF [Humans make great antennas for RF you know .. hmm well in the AM and VHF range anyway as UHF and FM are very tight wavelengths and tend to get dampened down]. I do not think I need to get into all the problems with small hand held tape recording units other than to say if you are using these things to chase EVP then stop now. As an engineer I would never trust the results you get from one of those things as they are just far too subject to mechanical faults and RF as well as tape problems to boot.
Now digital hand held recorders are a good step but I would stay away from the old school DAT recorder [good god I am calling DAT old school I remember when it first came out.. Getting old I guess]. The reason I say this is they like their analogue brothers still use tape as the medium to store information and also like their brothers have a lot of moving parts. In this case it is the DAT tape itself that is more the problem.
I am not sure if many of you know this but a DAT tape is really only good for one recording pass [two if you are lucky] and then it is subject to PCM errors and mechanical problems. The more you pass the tape over the head recording over the same place again the higher the rate of PCM errors and surface tape faults will occur. Now this is not like the old punch through that you would get with good old tape. A PCM glitch can sound like anything to be blunt as old DATA packets from previous recordings can be mixed up in it or be the root cause of other errors to start with. The thing I find interesting is even if you wipe the whole tape there can still be old information on it and this can come through into the next recording just like the old analogue tape can.
What I would like to point out and I believe David has said the same thing that if you wish to chase EVP then you need to get a unit that has no moving parts. But an I-phone even though it has no moving parts is a bad idea as its whole reason for being is to be well a “PHONE” so it has an antenna.
Simple audio rule for you is if it’s not a radio mic then it should not have an antenna and the last thing you want next to your recorder is say a 1.9 or 2.4 GHz receiver transmitter. I do not think I need to go into why this is a bad combination for a divice being used to chase EVP. sort of a no brainer really.
Get yourself a Zoom H2 or some such unit that is stand alone. In fact if I were you I would get three or four of them and use a clap to sync them all and use them all at the same time.
Anyway I digress as the main point here is if you are really serious about EVP then get a unit with no moving parts and no receiver or transmitter in it.<O
</O
Please record it as an AIFF [.wav] and at the highest bit rate the unit lets you. Also please keep the recording at 44.1 kHz.<O</O
Now I would like to add for the record that even though I have not found any EVP myself in all the time I have been an engineer does not mean there is nothing to this phenomenon as I expect there just maybe but until we can set a standard to which all investigators use then the whole thing in my opinion is a joke. Ignore ghost hunters and TAPS and that ilk as let’s face it that is about good TV and not real investigation. If it was about real investigation they would know how to use their audio gear the right way and would be using the right gear to start with but anyway that’s just my opinion.
If any of you out there have some EVP and want to get it looked at then please contact me as I am most happy to help when I can.
I intened to start drawing up some EVP rules as some one has to start getting a standard into this field so if any of the other sound guys/girls here would like to add to this please join in and let us get a final set of rules for hunting EVP.
Peace
Stone
Hopefully I am not the only full time sound engineer here in this forum [fingers crossed] but here are some of my thoughts on the subject from a technical point of view when it comes to why you should use a unit with no moving parts and no phone attached.
Ok well to start with I will be blunt.
Not meaning to sound negative but I have been a sound engineer for 17 years now and in all that time I have not once heard anything that I could not explain as cross talk, punch through, dirty tape, interference, RF faults [radio bleed], bad earth, or a simple PCM glitch [digital artefacts etc PCM means Pulse code modulation to those who don’t know].
In my professional opinion I would not trust small hand held analogue recording units not to pick up RF [Humans make great antennas for RF you know .. hmm well in the AM and VHF range anyway as UHF and FM are very tight wavelengths and tend to get dampened down]. I do not think I need to get into all the problems with small hand held tape recording units other than to say if you are using these things to chase EVP then stop now. As an engineer I would never trust the results you get from one of those things as they are just far too subject to mechanical faults and RF as well as tape problems to boot.
Now digital hand held recorders are a good step but I would stay away from the old school DAT recorder [good god I am calling DAT old school I remember when it first came out.. Getting old I guess]. The reason I say this is they like their analogue brothers still use tape as the medium to store information and also like their brothers have a lot of moving parts. In this case it is the DAT tape itself that is more the problem.
I am not sure if many of you know this but a DAT tape is really only good for one recording pass [two if you are lucky] and then it is subject to PCM errors and mechanical problems. The more you pass the tape over the head recording over the same place again the higher the rate of PCM errors and surface tape faults will occur. Now this is not like the old punch through that you would get with good old tape. A PCM glitch can sound like anything to be blunt as old DATA packets from previous recordings can be mixed up in it or be the root cause of other errors to start with. The thing I find interesting is even if you wipe the whole tape there can still be old information on it and this can come through into the next recording just like the old analogue tape can.
What I would like to point out and I believe David has said the same thing that if you wish to chase EVP then you need to get a unit that has no moving parts. But an I-phone even though it has no moving parts is a bad idea as its whole reason for being is to be well a “PHONE” so it has an antenna.
Simple audio rule for you is if it’s not a radio mic then it should not have an antenna and the last thing you want next to your recorder is say a 1.9 or 2.4 GHz receiver transmitter. I do not think I need to go into why this is a bad combination for a divice being used to chase EVP. sort of a no brainer really.
Get yourself a Zoom H2 or some such unit that is stand alone. In fact if I were you I would get three or four of them and use a clap to sync them all and use them all at the same time.
Anyway I digress as the main point here is if you are really serious about EVP then get a unit with no moving parts and no receiver or transmitter in it.<O
</OPlease record it as an AIFF [.wav] and at the highest bit rate the unit lets you. Also please keep the recording at 44.1 kHz.<O
</ONow I would like to add for the record that even though I have not found any EVP myself in all the time I have been an engineer does not mean there is nothing to this phenomenon as I expect there just maybe but until we can set a standard to which all investigators use then the whole thing in my opinion is a joke. Ignore ghost hunters and TAPS and that ilk as let’s face it that is about good TV and not real investigation. If it was about real investigation they would know how to use their audio gear the right way and would be using the right gear to start with but anyway that’s just my opinion.
If any of you out there have some EVP and want to get it looked at then please contact me as I am most happy to help when I can.
I intened to start drawing up some EVP rules as some one has to start getting a standard into this field so if any of the other sound guys/girls here would like to add to this please join in and let us get a final set of rules for hunting EVP.
Peace
Stone
