The RCA RP5030 Digital Voice Recorder, SEPRS Pick for Audio Recording
Audio equipment falls into three categories: handheld voice recorders, analog tape recorders, and computer audio recording. The purpose of audio equipment is to capture anomalous sounds on an investigation. First and foremost among these anomalous sounds are Electronic Voice Phenomena, or EVP. We'll soon have a section on EVP that goes into it in some detail, but for the moment, EVP, in a nutshell, is when, on an investigation, you capture voices on a recording medium that were not audible when the recording was made. Your number one tool for capturing EVP is a handheld voice recorder, so let's discuss those first.
Handheld Digital Voice Recorders (DVRs) come in many varieties, and you can pick them up at most department stores or electronics stores, starting at about $30. The things to consider when buying one are the amount of memory, the recording file type, and what you're going to eventually transfer the files to, whether an analog tape, or into a computer to transfer to a cd or to use with sound editing software. The DVR that most SEPRS members are using with success is the RCA RP5030. The advantages of this unit are:
1. It's priced in everyone's budget. You can pick one of these up starting at about $40. You can certainly find cheaper units than this, but not with anywhere near the feature set that the RP5030 has.
2. It records directly into .mp3 format. This saves a lot of time and trouble when transferring to a computer. Otherwise you would have to play back the files and record them as audio in real time via an analog to analog cable. With this unit, you can plug the included USB cable into your computer and quickly transfer the .mp3 files into iTunes or something similar to burn to cd, or into sound editing software. However, it does also have an analog jack if you want to transfer your recordings to a cassette tape or something similar.
3. It's got 64 MB of memory, so you've got plenty of room for a full night's recording at high quality.
4. If you are transferring your files to a computer, this model is cross-platform compatible.
The reason that DVRs are the tool of choice for EVP is that they are handheld and you can carry them with you anywhere on an investigation, and they're specifically designed for recording voice.
The RCA RP5030 Digital Voice Recorder, SEPRS Pick for Audio Recording
The second tool used for audio recording are plain analog cassette recorders. These are great for setting up and leaving them alone to record in empty rooms. They're cheap enough to be able to have several of them. When you're using analog cassette recorders, it's best to use them with a microphone. This doesn't necessarily have to be a great quality mic, but it is better than using the built-in mic on the cassetter recorder, which often will record the mechanics of the recorder as a slight background hum. You can usually find analog cassette recorders that come packed with a small external microphone. There is a theory that analog cassette records might have a further advantage because of the strong possibility that paranormal phenomena is electro-magnetic in nature, and that magnetic mediums such as analog audio cassettes would have a better chance of capturing this phenomena than a digital recorder. The disadvantages of a analog cassette recorder are that it is time consuming and tedious to transfer your recording to another medium and the fact that audio cassettes shouldn't be reused more than a couple of times because the sound quality tends to degrade.
The last audio recording option is recording directly into the computer. This is an option we use in conjunction with our video surveillance software, but there are other ways to do it. Any sound recording software will do the trick, along with an extension cable and a microphone. Your best bet for an extension cable is going to be from a surveillance store or something of the like where you can get cables that are 100 feet or even longer. Most of these will have RCA or BNC type plugs on them, so you'll have to get adapters to plug a microphone into them and to plug them into your computer. You can get the adapters you need at Radio Shack or online. We've got a good quality, semi-pro omnidirectional microphone that we mount to one of the surveillance camera tripods. We plug it into the audio end of the cable running to the camera, and plug the other end directly into the soundcard on the laptop, and record the audio with the picture for that camera. Ideally, you could also find an interface to run several microphones into a Firewire or USB port, and record each on a separate track in something like Garage Band, but so far we haven't been able to locate anything with more than two mic inputs at a home-studio price. We'll update you when we do.