Recording thunder and rain with the Edirol R-09
Edirol R-09 portable field recorder
For its price (around £200) the R-09 has pretty good sound quality, though the noise floor is quite high especially on high mic gain setting. Its main advantages are size and good battery life. The R-09 fits easily into a coat pocket and runs for hours off 2 AA batteries.
Here is a recording of a rainstorm with some thunder from my bedroom window. The Edirol was attached to the inside of a velux window with electrical tape. Although it has a neoprene case it isn’t waterproof! From around 15 minutes of recording this was edited down to 5 minutes of usable sound (without sirens, aeroplanes, traffic and rail noise)
The Edirol R09-HR has a better noise floor than the R09. If you want any significant improvement on it, then you’re perhaps looking at buying a different class of digital recorder. Quite a lot of the recordings on the London Sound Survey website were done with externals mics and an Edirol R09-HR:
http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk
Thanks for commenting. My first field recording setup was a sony md recorder plus core sound binaurals, which sounded better than the R-09 but wasnt as convenient.
I am looking at something along the lines of a Sound Devices or Fostex FR-2 (with Sennheiser 416 or ME-50) for professional film and tv location sound recording.
In the meantime I’m renting the top flight gear!
The link looks really interesting, I will check it out in more detail