Robust handheld recorder for Antartica

Hey all,

my apologies if this is a repeat of material already covered here but I have very little time at the moment to search here or do proper research elsewhere.

My wife is heading down to Antartica on Friday for a 1 month trip aboard a ship which is a mix of scientists, some paying guests and some very lucky schoolkids. She is a writer and the opportunity to gather material for a radio documentary for our national broadcaster has come up in the last few days. She may be able to get a recorder from the broadcaster but if not she will probably need to purchase something before Friday.

She needs a handheld digital recorder with the following features (if such a thing exists)

-robust (she hopes to use this on deck to capture whale/bird sounds etc) so there will be issues of cold and moisture and condensation when she goes back inside
-Good SNR for capturing lowlevel sounds (they will be spending overnights on the continent)
-swappable memory cards
-easy to dump files onto her mac with USB would be great
-some form of windscreens to enable use in windy conditions
-Easy to use
-Good sound


The trickiest thing will be getting something that can handle the windy conditions without getting special accessories.

My wife doesn't know what she needs and I'm too busy right now to devote hours to proper research - it's coming up on 2am here and I'm working on mixes in the studio, at 7am I have to leave for meetings for my day job
Don't you just love the music business :green:


If anyone has any suggestions I would greatly appreciate it. The purchase will have to be made tomorrow or Thursday in a nearby city.

Cheers,
Ruairi

Look into the Korg MR-1000.

It's got a 20gig hard drive in it, and records in DSD mode, allowing you to downsample to any 24bit sampling frequency. Broadcasters may like that

It's built like a tank, and includes the mic pre's etc she'll need.

If you want to play with the serious pro's - look at Sound Devices products
www.sounddevices.com - they are some serious professional tools.

Both of those units use converters above 114dB - which should be plenty to capture all sorts of audio, and not have to worry too much about level setting to get the best out of them.

Cheers

R

[quote author="Rochey"]

If you want to play with the serious pro's - look at Sound Devices products
www.sounddevices.com - they are some serious professional tools.
Cheers
R[/quote]

(OT..hey Roche, check your PM messages, work for you !!)

Here are some good sites for portable rec info.
Equip. reviews and a message board..
Transom
http://www.transom.org/tools/
http://talk.transom.org/

These guys are helpful as well....I bought my Marantz portable recorder through them.
http://www.oade.com/

Here are some links to the major recorders (and a cool site, as well)..
http://www.avisoft.com/linkseq.htm

=FB=

Hey guys,

thanks for the info guys. I've had zero time to look into this, my workday started at 7am and I just finished (2am here). It looks like one my wife's clients went ahead and bought one of those HHB all in one microphone recorders (the Flash Mic). Wouldn't have been my choice as it appears to be mono and cardioid so it all but rules out gathering nice atmospherics. Anyhow it seems that her needs are covered for this trip.

Thanks,
Ruairi