"steve" wrote in message


I may want to have a bash at making a recording of my wife's choir. I
realize it will not be remotely professional quality, but I hope I
could do better than a portable cassette deck!

I had in mind recording in two ways:
1. On my Sony Minidisk player
2. On my PC, creating a WAV file onto the hard disc, which I could
later put onto CD.

I have an old but decent (I think) pair of Panasonic microphones
which I could experiment with. I assume I would stick them into my
stereo amplifier (circa 1975), and then feed the output into my
Minidisk player and into the sound card of the PC.

I know my home PC (Athlon 1400 processor) seems quite happy at making
decent WAV files, using Musicmatch software. I haven't tried yet
with my work laptop (Intel 900), and I don't know what software I
would use on that.

Thanks for any (polite) suggestions, or any pointers to web sites
that I would find useful.

Were I to use a portable recorder, I'd stick to stereo, use my Nomad Jukebox
3 which records .wav files,, a Behringer MXB1002 mixer and a pair of mics.
My choice of relatively inexpensive mics would be either my Behringer EC8000
(omnidirectional) or MXL 603 (broad directivity cardiod). I'd upload the
recording to my PC and edit and master with editing software ranging from
Goldwave and Audacity (freeware) to Adobe Audition.

Were I to use a PC, I'd probably not want to limit myself to stereo but
enjoy the flexibility of multichannel recording and the ability to pick,
choose and mix from more channels and more microphone positions. For
example, spot micing soloists is a common technique. It would be possible to
use separate mics for any accompanying instrumentalists.

Sound card of choice would be a M-Audio 1010LT, which has 8 analog line
inputs and outputs (includes 2 mic preamps but they lack phantom power). My
choice of mics (above, just more of them) require phantom power, so I'd pick
a mixer with 8 mic preamps, phantom power, and insert points where I could
tap off the outputs of just the mic preamps. I'd use the mixer itself for
real-time monitoring, but do the actual mixing for the final delivered
recording, after-the-fact. In this case I still sense that cost is an issue,
so another larger Behringer mixer, such as the MX2642 would probably be my
choice. I'd do the recording and mixing with my copy of Adobe Audition.