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Equipment
Here's a description of the equipment we use to produce
our podcasts.
Broadcast quality digital audio recorder: We use a Marantz PMD-660 portable stereo digital recorder. It's the kind the radio networks like AP and NPR use. It can record in high quality stereo PCM, WAV, or MP3 formats, using internal mikes, external mikes, or via line input from a sound system. Recordings are stored on removable Compact Flash (CF) cards like the ones used in digital cameras. A 1 gb CF card can store up to 17 hours of MP3 stereo sound. We transfer the recordings to a 2.5 GHz Dell 8300 Media Center PC with 1/2 terabyte storage for editing.
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Microphones: For our main studio microphones we're using a matched set of Shure RS-130 vocal mikes, with a discontinued Realistic (Radio Shack) 32-1210 six channel mixer driving our Aureal soundcard. For location recording, we back up the RS-130s with three Radio Shack lavaliere mikes attached to Radio Shack's 32-1252 wireless audio link transmitters that feed into three separate 32-1250 wireless microphone receivers.
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For some applications, we use an Olympus DS-2 stereo digital recorder: This portable digital recorder delivers stereo audio files in WMA format or the proprietary Olympus DSS format. It will also record directly to WAV files, but at a significant reduction in the available recording time.We record the programs in WMA format to maximize the stereo recording time at about 2 hours and 15 minutes. The DS-2 connects to a PC with a USB cradle. |
Audacity: We've started editing our podcasts in Audacity. It is a little less complicated than N-Track Studio, and has some features that work better for podcasting. We still like N-Track Studio for musical production and editing.
For conversion of our finished productions, we use dbPowerAmp Music Converter, which can convert in either direction from a wide range of audio file formats.