Last month my friend Mario took the whole month off and traveled to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico for a vacation.Before he left, he generously offered to take one of my recorders and roll some audio when he was down there. Now, Mario is a brilliant chef but he's got about zero experience rolling audio so when he made the offer to take some gear down there with him I figured my Sony PCM M10 would be the best choice for a few reasons:
- The M10 has top shelf battery life. I figured he'd need to change batteries one time max for the whole trip, and that's if he was recording a TON. The more likely scenario was that he wouldn't have to change batteries at all. Battery life on this device is the best of any that I own, and far superior to most others on the market.
- The M10 has the most storage. It has 4 Gb built in, and another 8 on the micro SD card that I have in it. The storage also rolls over seamlessly from the internal to the SD card with no user interaction required. Thats an advantage it has over my PCM D50, and over many other handheld recorders on the market.
- The M10 doesn't require wind protection. Sure, if it gets up to 15 mph or so it'll blow out, but south of that the built in wind protection works fine. That can't be said of my D50 or of most other devices with exposed electret condenser mics. In fact, my D50 often requires wind protection indoors, since even the slightest AC gust will blow it out.
- The M10 is about the size of an iphone, and can easily fit in a pocket. Its about half the size of the D50 or H4n.
-The M10 costs about $200. If it gets destroyed for any reason I won't feel too hard of a loss.
So low maintenance, high capacity, super portable, and moderatly expendable. I have higher resolution rigs obviously, but this is the only one I could really send out in this capacity with a non-audio guy as the recordist.
And oh man did Mario deliver. I've only posted a small compilation of some of the stuff he brought back to me, but it really was impressive. Mario took great pride in his recordings, he just nailed his gain structure and technique, and enjoyed taking some time in the various locales to just sit and listen to what was going on around him.
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| This horse was pulling a cart that rode on the railroad tracks. He had pretty good speed too! |
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| Great peacock recording right at the outset. |
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| That's Mario on the right. |
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| Even the traffic ambiances had a smattering of jungle creatures in them. I love it! |
I couldn't be more happy with how it went, and I'm super impressed with the quality that the internal mics on the M10 were able to deliver.
When an opportunity arises, you have to be ready to seize it. The process of sorting out and listening through all of his recordings from that trip is one of the most enjoyable things I've done all year.
Thanks Mario!
