The subject - a chaffinch at about 100 yard (estimated) on a crisp Sunday morning, wind between 0 and 2mph according to the BBC. Using an MKE300 or the RememBird with omni mic is not a reasonable way to do this, you need a parabolic dish. The aim was to push the envelope, try something at extreme range. Through my 8x40 bins the chaffinch was clearly identifiable, though it wouldn't be described as a good view, looking into the early morning sun. Swarovski 10x40 owners would have had an easier time. It was singing from a bush about head-height above the ground. The soundscape was, in the words of R. Murray Schafer[1], hi-fi - the wanted signal was clearly audible above the general background. Much more so that is audible from the recordings, but then I had the advantage of stereo.
Unlike many locations, Snettisham in Norfolk is reasonably quiet on a Sunday morning before the residents of te nearby holiday village have woken up. permitting this test. The MKE300 was used with a Sony MZ-NH700 minidisc recorder on high-gain at maximum gain of 30. Even at this level signals were on average about -30dBFS. The RememBird signal was peaking about -42dBFS, though the greater low frequency response made this peak at -24dBFS on wind rumble.
Figure 1: The rig, MKE300 above, RememBird below.
From the rig photo you can see one of the advantages of the RememBird clearly - it is a lot smaller than the MKE300!.
Figure 2: sonogram of one phrase of the chaffinch, settings the same on both of these
Fig.2 shows a sonogram of one phrase of the chaffinch recording, clear of breathing noise on the RememBird. Both audio files were normalised to about the same level (the examples linked to this article) and the Raven settings are the same. The MKE's directionality suppresses the ducks behind, which appears as a regular pattern below 2kHz.
