Tuesday, January 8, 2008

The only thing I like about flying is that it is a great time to listen to the ipod and play my DS.
Also I received the Handy Zoom H2 from Amazon.com yesterday and I'm bringing that and it instruction manual, to figure out how to use it. It's a high def portable audio recorder. Solid state, records up to 24BIT Depth 96kHZ Audio. I need to get a small microphone so I can discretely record some of my missions, but for the most part I will be interviewing people with their permission and or myself.

The main idea is to record interesting interviews with any interesting looking people I come across and also place recordings, audio field trips.

I get lost thinking about the complexity and beauty of audio recorded at 96 kHZ.

Here's a quick primer:
from: ( http://www.tweakheadz.com/16_vs_24_bit_audio.htm )
Check out TweakHeadz for lots of good info.

Bit Depth refers to the number of bits you have to capture audio. The easiest way to envision this is as a series of levels, that audio energy can be sliced at any given moment in time. With 16 bit audio, there are 65,536 possible levels. With every bit of greater resolution, the number of levels double. By the time we get to 24 bit, we actually have 16,777,216 levels. Remember we are talking about a slice of audio frozen in a single moment of time.

Now lets add our friend Time into the picture. That's where we get into the Sample Rate.
The sample rate is the number of times your audio is measured (sampled) per second. So at the red book standard for CDs, the sample rate is 44.1 kHz or 44,100 slices every second. So what is the 96khz sample rate? You guessed it. It's 96,000 slices of audio sampled each second.

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