Podcast extract from Vintage by Maxine Linnell

I recently had the pleasure of recording Maxine Linnell reading an extract from her new time-swap novel 'Vintage', in which a contemporary teenager swaps places with a counterpart from 1962.

I'm podcasting the recording here, partly to recommend the novel (which is excellent) and partly to experiment with embedding audio files in blogger - which I hope to do much more of in the coming months.

For those of you interested in the recent technical discussion of microphones and field recorders, this recording was made on my Sony Z1 camera, and not with the Marantz PMD661 - which I hadn't bought at the time of recording.

Note: As I write this additional note, the podcast link has stopped working. The audio file hosting site seems to be down - so that is probably the reason. I will clearly have to look for other solutions.

New Microphone

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the Marantz PMD 661 field recorder. I'm still extremely pleased with the way it works with my Rode shotgun microphone. That covers my film making needs. But I do intend to use the recorder for audio interviews in the near future, and realised that a different kind of microphone is necessary for that.

For that usage I need an omnidirectional rather than a shotgun microphone. I also need it to have shielding to prevent all that nasty handling noise. I don't have a background in audio technology, so need to rely on reviews to guide my choice of equipment. This was fairly easy with the field recorders - which are extensively reviewed on the Internet. But with microphones I had a harder time. It seems that very few people choose to review microphones. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised to discover that.

I eventually decided on the AKG D230. I managed to buy a second hand one on Ebay - which should arrive sometime in the next couple of weeks. When it does I will offer my own very inexpert review.

As for the question of what audio interviews am I intending to conduct - it is connected to my interest in dyslexia. I'll say more about that in a future blog post.

Marantz PMD661 field recorder

Excitement yesterday as a parcel containing my new Marantz PMD661 field recorder arrived at the door. Having a new toy does tend to throw my day out of equilibrium. Instead of writing two thousand words of novel, I unpacked the box and started to explore a new world of high quality sound recording.


My choice of the Marantz over other field recorders came from an extensive survey of reviews on the Internet - reviews penned by people who know more about sound recording than I ever will. Without getting too technical here, I'll say that I needed a recorder that would take an external microphone input via balanced XLR connectors. I wanted it to record onto memory cards, have reasonable battery life and as good a quality preamplifier as I could afford.

Of all the review sites, the most helpful was the one at Wingfield Audio - with its superb table of sound samples from different machines. And I eventually found the best UK price at Pink Noise Systems, who were so helpful that I will certainly be checking their website if I need more audio kit in future.

So - now it is out of the box and I've had 24 hours to play with it, I have to report that I love everything about the Marantz PMD661. The look and feel of the machine are very satisfying. Plugging in a good microphone and a set of reasonable headphones is like having bionic hearing. I don't know where to take it that is quiet enough to find out how good the preamp really is - but so far so good. Yesterday I thought I detected a slight hum - but then realised I was hearing the fan in my laptop some distance away.

If I can figure out how to embed audio into this blog, I'll share some recordings in the near future.