As an Electronic Engineer by training, and particularly interested in the audio field, I have been recording concerts as a hobby ever since I had the money to buy equipment. I started in the 1980s with a Nakamichi 550 cassette deck, which did a better job than the Tandy microphone that I could afford at the time. The issue with using cassettes was not so much the fidelity of the recording, which was quite good, but the process of mastering and making copies introduced degradation. I recall that the timbre of the clarinet was rather mangled by recording flutter.
The set-up that I now use is still a little constrained by cost-saving, but works well. Starting at the microphone, I mount a Sony ECM-MS957 stereo unit on a stand which can reach up over ten feet. It’s the microphones above all that dictate recording sound quality, and at professional level they run into thousands of dollars which is well beyond what I am prepared to spend. I run the mike on a shortish lead into a battery-powered Roland M-10 mixer, which boosts the level up to line and allows a long run back to a Roland UA-30 Analogue to Digital converter, and that in turn connects at digital level to a laptop via USB. All the equipment is now over ten years old, although it’s strange that Roland say that the UA-30 is unsupported in Vista or Windows 7, because it works fine using the generic drivers. Finally, I use Goldwave digital sound processing software to record and edit.
The whole exercise at the concert is a set and forget affair that takes less than half an hour to construct. With the luxury of plenty of space on the laptop hard disk I start the recording well before the performance, and stop it well after. The recording is done at CD quality 44.1kHz, so the files are about 600MB per hour.
Afterwards, Goldwave is used for the slightly laborious process of chopping the recording into pieces and movements, and they can then be burnt onto a CD or distributed as MP3s via USB stick. There are countless sound editing features in Goldwave – it really is an exceptional piece of software – but the only ones I use are volume fades and normalisation and introducing reverb to soften the sound.
At the end of the day I admit that I am an amateur playing in amateur groups: the recordings have moments, even whole movements, of real beauty, but as a whole they are most valuable as a learning tool for the players involved. I personally find it a little distressing to wait for a cracked note of mine that I know is about to come, every time! However, one of these days I’d like to produce a cherry-picked set of recordings that are of sufficient quality to distribute proudly amongst friends, or even to be “sold at the door” at our concerts.