In mouth of Rocky Valley, near Tintagel, Cornwall, 1

Recording made on 8th September 2012 with a Sony PCM-M10 on a Hama mini-tripod, using the built-in microphones covered with a Rycote Mini Windjammer. I have used a graphic EQ profile in WavePad to compensate for the slight muffling of the sound caused by the Windjammer.

The beautiful and very rugged Rocky Valley, near Tintagel, Cornwall, opens narrowly to the sea, where the stream has cut a miniature gorge in the rock and pours over various sharp rocky edges in little cascades, then meeting the sea, which, at the time of this recording, fills the bottom stretch of this mini-gorge. Indeed, the sea is already greatly narrowed into a little inlet here, so there is potential for high jinks here when a storm is blowing and large Atlantic swell is crashing in!

However, on this occasion the swell is extremely small, and so I was able to bring the recorder to the edge of the mini-gorge to get a relatively close-up take of the meeting of the stream and the constantly restless sea.

I took two half-hour-plus recordings here. For this one I sought to shelter the recorder from a gentle breeze by placing it in an angular recess in the rock platform. I was also interested to see what perhaps interesting acoustic effect this placement would have. The recorder is above the sea in the bottom end of the mini-gorge, pointing obliquely upstream. It is somewhat shielded from the strong continuous 'white noise' of the stream by a slight bend of the mini-gorge, so you can hear the sea above the stream noise.

This upstream view is from very close to where the recorder was placed.

The acoustic effect is, unsurprisingly, not such an expansive sound-field as compared with the other recording (though it still sounds great), and there is a low-frequency resonance that gives a frequent gentle low 'whump', a bit like wind noise but synchronized with the wave movements, so it couldn't be the general breeze but would be very slight air pressure waves from the sea waves, concentrated in the little rock recess where the recorder was placed.

This recording actually didn't sound very nice on my computer speakers because their boominess picked up that resonance of the little rocky recess and caused a rather overwhelming boominess of the sound. On the other hand, on my genuine hi-fi system, with reasonably flat frequency response, it sounds really beautiful and not really what I would call 'boomy' at all, though there is definitely a certain coloration to the sound.

...Later note, January 2013:
I finally withdrew and discarded the other recording, because the interesting details in its sound are all too lost in the general hiss from the stream tumbling between the crags. I thus regard this recording as being the definitive one that I would keep.

Please note that the volume level of this recording has been carefully adjusted for listening purposes, and ALL my recordings so far are meant to be listened to with a volume setting that would give a realistic level for playback of CLASSICAL music (a large but not exceptional symphony orchestra). If you have the right volume setting, you should not need to change that setting from one recording of mine to another.

Please remember to give this recording a rating!