Recording setup for 2 people in an office

October 29, 2014 10:36 AM

We want to capture eight hours at a time of conversation in an office, for editing later. There are two people at separate desks. What equipment is needed, within the sweet spot between "sounds good enough" and "affordable"? The end result should be 2 separate audio files, editable in Audacity. Paint me a picture of the setup you'd use for this.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic to Grab Bag (8 answers total)

That depends what exactly you need it for--getting a recording for a transcription is different from, say, an acoustic analysis, or something that you might want to splice into a movie. iPhones have pretty good internal recorders, and might be all you need; if you want something a little better, you can add on some sort of external mic for fairly cheap.
posted by damayanti at 10:41 AM on October 29, 2014

Why not just use the computers, heck you could even use Audacity to do the recording?
posted by Confess, Fletch at 10:43 AM on October 29, 2014 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Why not just use the computers, heck you could even use Audacity to do the recording?

Ok, that's much simpler than I had thought of. I like this.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 11:02 AM on October 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

you can also get a little external mic that hooks into USB if you want to up the sound quality for not all that much. some have their own stands. :)
posted by acm at 11:45 AM on October 29, 2014

If you do it on the computers (I would!) Make sure you have enough storage space as you don't want your c drive to blow up half way through! You might want a pop shield to reduce plosive sounds too
posted by KateViolet at 12:32 PM on October 29, 2014

There's a lot more info one would need here. Are there more people speaking than just those two involved? Are those two going to be moving about the office while speaking or sitting still for 8 hours?

If sitting still, then get 2 usb mics like the Blue Snowball $49 each for a total of $98 and free shipping from B&H. Record straight into the computer.

If they are going to be moving about while speaking, things get complicated and costly very quickly. At that point, your most economic option would be to actually rent a couple of *wired* lavaliers and body recorders. You could buy, but that would run you about $300. If you don't have access to a cheap rental place, then I'd go with this setup:

2 Aspen Lavalier Mics for - $80.91

2 Zoom H1 Recorders - $199.98

and a total cost of $280.89. Depending on where you are, and how quickly you want this, you may have to add tax and shipping (for the Aspen, the B&H is free).

The Blue Snowball solution for $98 is the simplest. The lavalier situation is marginally more hassle. In either case, run a test first, to make sure it's working. The big issue you are going to face is that you will have no monitoring while recording. If you want monitoring, then your costs will escalate dramatically - by multiples; that's a separate discussion, so I won't go further, other than to mention, that if you are recording 8 hours and not monitoring you are flying blind, and may discover you've just got 8 hours of unusable stuff. I repeat: run a quick test first, to make sure the set up is working: check the levels of the recording, distance from mics, make sure you have fresh batteries (if you're going with the Zoom recorders).

I should mention one other thing. Environmental noise. Is the office noisy? Computer fan? AC? Printers? People walking-talking? Traffic outside windows? All that might show up on the recordings and it will be hell to edit with that noise on the track. Mic as closely as you can without getting breathy pops. Try to get stuff quiet for the recording, if you can control that.
posted by VikingSword at 1:54 PM on October 29, 2014

One other thing that I didn't mention, but is highly dependent on where you are. If you are prepared to spend $300, you might actually be better off hiring a professional sound guy/gal. If you are near a film school or the like, you might get a student super cheap - like $100 - to do this for you. Outline the situation - very easy for a sound person to deal with - and for one day a film student with sound experience (and for this setup it doesn't take much) might do it for $100. Even a pro, if they are not working at the moment, might do it for $250-$300. That way you are not spending money on equipment, and you'll get top quality stuff, because they'll most likely use pro gear, they'll be able to monitor in real time, they'll mic the two people, and they'll be sensitive to issues like noise, and you don't have to think about a thing - just get results.

That assumes of course, that this is a one-time deal, because if it is, then what are you doing with all that purchased gear once you have your recording? I suppose you can sell it on CL or eBay. If it's something that's likely to come up more often, then it might be worth investing the $100-$300 for the gear so you have it on hand for any future engagements.
posted by VikingSword at 2:14 PM on October 29, 2014

Sorry to be popping back in again - promise this is the last time. But it occurred to me, that if you have a couple of iPhones or Androids there is a way to bypass the need to buy a dedicated recorders for the lavs, which saves you the $99.99 x 2 = $199.98 cost. You can then just buy the Aspen Lavaliers and a couple of cable adapters to connect the mic to the phones - $9.99 x 2 = $19.98 and hook them up to two phones which the people then keep on their person as they walk about. You use an app to record - it's all explained here with videos and links:

Affordable Quality Sound AspenMics Lavalier Microphone for DSLR Video

And now, you can reduce your cost to about $100 for the lav solution as well! It's a bit more fiddly, but will definitely work. Of course, again, I stress: test everything out, to make sure you know how to set the levels and get a decent outcome. When editing, remember, that whatever gets recorded at the time as background noise of what those folks record, will greatly complicate your editing process and may ruin the result. If f.ex. you can hear a car alarm go off in the background or some other noise, then you may be faced with a situation where if you edit in such a way that you time-shift or intercut between these two folks, you'll suddenly hear the car alarm and then hear it again in a different place where you put it when you time shifted in editing. So noise can really ruin things for you, and can be very hard to remove without sophisticated software and a lot of time. The best defense against noise is to have the voice be much stronger than the background noise (S/N signal to noise ratio), usually you do this by having the mic closer to the mouth. The one thing to watch out for in recording is not to be *too* close, otherwise you'll get all sorts of breathing, saliva sounds and so forth. Also, don't overdrive the levels so that the recording is so loud it "clips" - that usually cannot be recovered from. And now I'll shut up.
posted by VikingSword at 3:01 PM on October 29, 2014 [1 favorite]