gregk

Hi and thanks for the tips! I think the 1 mic per table idea is good but it might be a little too much for now. Another concern is simplicity because I need to be able to break down fairly quickly. I am going to try using 1 channel to mic the speaker and the other channel will mic the audience from 1 or 2 locations facing away from the kitchen with directional mics. Will see how that works and then try something a little different the next week if it doesnt work out quite right. Also I am just going to try a simple passive mixer like the ART PowerMIX I to mix in the mics for the audience channel, if it doesnt work out I am sure I can find a use for it with my guitar so it wont be a waste. The other thing is that I can continue to use my current combination of the MZ-RH1 and the ECMMS907 mic and do my experimenting with a second MD recorder I have until I find the setup that works best. If anyone has any other tips / ideas let me know! Thanks all, Greg

Sorry I had to edit my post above, I neglected to mention we need to record the audience and the speaker. We are having the coffee house stay open extra for us each week, and the agreement is that we need to buy lots of stuff so they can afford to stay open. I will ask if there is any way they can reduce noise, but most of it is coming from the equipment they need to make beverages for us. I considered a portable wireless system to mic to record the speaker but they start around 500 bucks and that is too expensive for us right now. Thanks for your response! Greg

Hi all, I have the MZ-RH1 and the ECMMS907 mic. Its pretty hard to get a good recording in this new situation I have to deal with. This is a weekly meeting we will be doing and we need to get a good recording, but have a very tight budget. We have a speaker who stands half way down and a little off to the side in a room that is longer than it is wide. The biggest problem right now is that there is a lot of noise that comes from the refrigerators and coffee makers. Edit: I forgot to add also that we need to mic the speaker and the audience so we can record their discussion with the main speaker. The nice thing is that the kitchen area is all located on one end of the room and no one is sitting around the kitchen. Here is a diagram: Yesterday I ordered 10 each of the panasonic WM-61 (omnidirectional) and WM-55 (unidirectional) mic elements. I plan to build some different rigs using combinations of these mics so I can experiment and see what will work best. So basically I am just looking for suggestions or ideas about what will be the best way to mic this room. Also is there any way to eliminate some of the noise coming from the kitchen area? I was thinking maybe I could use boundary mics facing into the sitting area between the kitchen and tables. I really don't know much about recording yet, so I have a lot to figure out. I have been reading on the net as much as a can but I haven't found anything dealing with a similar situation where they need to record a speaker + audience in a coffee shop situation where there is a lot of background noise. Thanks for reading! Greg

I am a new owner of the RH1 as of last week! It's the only reason I decided minidisc was finally worth giving a try... My dad gave me his old NF810 after he got tired of it and got a new non-MD device for recording his band practice. I thought I would give MD another chance (after having looked into it a few years ago and being disappointed with its shortcomings) and then I found out about the new Hi-MD which were able to digitally upload to a computer finally! I have always been a big fan of Sony products but its also frustrating they don't always listen to what customers really want in their products. I was happy to find out that they finally made the minidiscs cool... They are great recording devices but as far as playback they don't really compete with other players out there, I use an iPod at the moment. Anyhow, I have one, it works good so far! Greg

Yea that worked thanks. It takes a lot of extra steps to use the MD vs my laptop for recording. With the laptop all I had to do was copy the file to my main PC, cut off the ends and convert it to MP3. So far with the MD I have to transfer it, remove the tracks, convert to wav, then I can finally cut the ends and convert to mp3 and those first 3 steps take a while on my computer. So basically the time I save not having to use my laptop is lost in the editing stage with the MD. At least I dont have to lug my beast of a laptop around anymore Thanks for the response, Greg

This recorder was given to me by my dad, and it partially what got me looking for a better MD device that could support digital transfers to the PC. Hence, I found the RH1 and it is a really good recorder, although I am still learning to use it properly. So I have this older MZ-NF810 Net-MD here and a bunch of new discs for it (which I know also can work with the RH1)...but what should I use it for? I'd like to have a good use for it, but since I only need the RH1...I am at a loss. Is there anyone else that upgraded to Hi-MD and uses the old equipment still? This is not all that important since I don't need this older device to work, just thought I would ask Greg

Hi all, I do recordings for my church to post on our website. I have been using my laptop with an M-Audio external sound card for a while, but I got really sick of lugging all that junk around when all we need is a medium quality mono mp3 for web use. So I got looking into portable recording devices, I have always thought the concept of MD's was great but for years was turned off by the fact that you can't transfer digitally to PC's. When I found out that Sony added that feature to their Hi-MD devices I was stoked! So I did a little research and decided that the RH1 was a the best choice for me. Yesterday I did my first test run with the RH1, recording the whole service which was about 59 minutes long. I just plug right into the outputs from our mixer. I used the Hi-SP recording mode. I transferred the music to my PC using Sonicstage 3.4 (I have since upgraded to 4.3 but have not used it yet). Then I had it convert the file to wav. When it was done it had split the single file into 16 tracks! I looked everywhere in Sonicstage for a way to prevent that, but I found nothing. I was able to manually put the tracks back together in Audacity, but this is a real pain, I would rather just carry my stupid laptop around lol. Is there a solution to this, I have been searching the forums but so far no luck. Did I just do something wrong when I recorded/transfered/converted the files? A second, but less significant problem at this point, which I suspect I have the answer to: I tested the recorder by recording some music from my pc off the analog outputs of my sound card. I left those files on there when I did the recording at church. One thing I had changed was the recording mode, I don't remember what mode I used to record from my PC, but when I did the recordings of my church I used Hi-SP. All of the files on the minidisc were .HMA if that helps. When I transferred all the files the beginning of the church recording was really messed up, like garbled and you could barely make out the music and voices. Is this because I changed record modes or did something else go wrong? I don't think there was anything wrong with the input levels because I was monitoring the minidisc with some headphones and it sounded fine the whole time. Fortunately the parts I needed from the church recording were fine, but I want to make sure this doesn't happen again if at all possible. Great forum here and thanks for reading! Thanks all! Greg