Recorders
In general, recorders have become far cheaper and most have become better as time has passed and advances in technology were made. In the early days of wildlife sound recording, heroic individuals hauled equipment weighing nearly half a ton on carts to record the sounds of nature - nowadays you can record at a quality matching the best with a recorder held in the palm of your hand.
If you are buying new, a HiMD recorder is an excellent choice for a modest cost of £150 to £250. Many successful sound recordings have been made using MD, and the uncompressed recording option on HiMD has exactly the same parameters as CD. You can take your recordings and transfer exactly the same data via your computer onto a CD without any change and play exactly what you recorded on your hifi. In practice you will usually want to edit it and correct volume levels.
Sony's RH1 HiMD recorder
If you want to save more, then consider buying used - these do not keep their value well and you can save more than half the cost going used. Also consider the orignal MD format (which includes NetMD) - used MD recorders can be had even cheaper. Check for a microphone input first - not all MD models have one! You should also bear in mind that some of the earlier MD models had microphone inputs that were rather noisy for nature recording, particularly with budget mics which have a lower sensitivity than pro models.
Recorder requirements
Any recorder you get must have the option of manual recording level setting, and some kind of display of recorded level. It must also have a microphone input. It needs to be designed for music recording, rather than speech recording. You should confirm that the device is capable of recording in at least CD format [1] before considering it. If you see the format described as ADPCM you are dealing something pitched as a voice recorder. It is preferable if your recorder gives you the option of recording uncompressed, and this is mandatory if your aim is to do scientific research into vocalisations using the recordings. It is not absolutely required if you are trying to match what you hear with recordings or recording for the aesthetic qualities. The original Minidisc format, although compressed is well worth considering at an entry level, and the recorders can be had cheaply on the secondhand market.
other options
Solid state recorders using Compact flash cards are attractive for their lack of mechanical noise, but at the time of writing are more expensive than HiMD new, and have some disadvantages. At the time of writing (2006) the cheaper end (sub £1000) of these recorders tend to lack sensitivity on the mic inputs, being aimed as musicians and other users, and is something that can cause problems in the field, where you simply can't lift the gain up enough to monitor your recording or get a decent level on the medium without getting too much recorder hiss. If you intend to go this way you need to seek the views of other wildlife sound recordists or try and get a loan sample to try with your chosen mics. Using CF cards mean you need to download your recordings to a computer frequently, or purchase a lot of relatively expensive CF cards. A 1Gb CF card is a lot more expensive than a 1GB HiMD which is about £1 which is something you need to factor in if you will be recording without access to a PC for a while.
Some MP3 players offer a record option but this is often at the level of a digital voice recorder. Hard disk based models, such some Iriver products, can record in PCM and will give you a phenomenal uncompressed recording time, due to the 40Gb storage capacity on some models.
With all modern recorders, but particularly with those where the recording facility is not the primary function of the recorder, you should bear in mind that the low sound levels in wildlife sound recording are a minority interest. Commercial pressures often drive the quality of the microphone stages down to levels that are not satisfactory for wildlife sound recording.
Specifications can be misleading - for instance the signal to noise ratio is usually specified with the microphone input driven at maximum signal level, so the noise is at its smallest compared to the signal. The problem with that is you need to be recording a rock band, not a robin, to achieve these levels in practice!
You can use older alternatives - some cassette recorders can be used successfully, and DAT recorders in good working order will give you excellent results. Open reel was a stalwart of wildlife sound recording for a long time, though you will find the equipment quite large and a lot heavier than a MD recorder!
after recording
After recording, you will want to transfer your recording into your PC for editing, and selecting the best takes. Digital recorders such as HiMD and solid state CF recorders or hard disk recorders allow you to transfer you recordings via USB to your computer. The advantages of this is your computer receives a bit-perfect copy of the sound file in the recorder, with no degradation. The transfer often takes place faster than the time it took to record the sound (ie an hour's worth of sound can be transferred in less than an hour) and you can then clear your recording media and be ready to record again.
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