Thrilling sea dramatics by Shag Rock headland, Perranporth — from low wall

Hair-raising sea dramatics, captured in great detail, with quite frequent crashes, bangs, booms, thumps and great eruptions of spray — yet also an uneasily peaceful soundscape, full of a quiet writhing menace. We're a little below the Coast Path a little south-west of the Shag Rock headland, near Perranporth, Cornwall, UK, on a precariously steep and somewhat convex slope that ends in cliff edge just a little further down, and the sonic panorama from here is breathtaking with the chunky breakers surging and crashing in and then booming and rumbling as they hit the cliff base hidden away below.

This was the upper of two concurrent recordings made in this session (on 18 February 2017), the recorder placed on a small tripod on top of a decrepit and vegetated drystone wall that runs down more or less to the cliff edge. This was one of three favoured spots for getting a good recording panorama from here. The other positions are on the precarious-seeming narrow track that goes obliquely westwards down this slope, following the line of a buried sewage pipe. The other concurrent recording was made about as far down as I'd ever want to go on that track, by the bottom inspection cover, below which the concrete sewage pipe is exposed on the cliff (clearly visible in the lower photo below).

Actually both these recordings were quite a disappointment for me, and I was even wondering whether to bother to upload them here (in the light of other recordings I'd made from there)!

Reason for that is that there was a lot of disturbance during that session from aeroplanes and helicopters (the former particularly including light aeroplanes from the nearby Perranporth Airfield, which latter was evidently busy this afternoon), and in addition I had to discard about the final quarter of this recording because of the breeze getting up and causing intrusive mic wind noise. Naturally, repeatedly I had to cut out superbly hair-raising 'best bits', and cut chunks out of episodes of which I managed to keep part. Thus what we hear in this edited version of the recording is rather a skeleton of the real 'wow' performance that Mother Nature was presenting me with there.

With that frustration about the two recordings, I got into 'the glass is half-empty' mode and thought them not all that worthwhile, and needing replacing. It was only when I listened carefully to both, at the proper volume level, to finally decide whether to upload this here, that I realized how superb they sound despite all that had been cut out.

Advisory

Because of the soundscape's big dynamic range, to get a realistic sound level the playing volume needs to be set at some 9dB above a normal sensible level. In addition, high-grade headphones are strongly recommended in order to get the best out of this complex soundscape and reproduce the very low frequencies reasonably correctly.

An earlier recording (8 February 2017) being made from this exact spot — look for black furry windshield on right; at this scale the tripod can hardly be seen.

Earlier photo (15 June 2013), from the coast path further south-west — the arrow pointing to the exact spot on the decrepit low drystone wall.

Techie stuff:
The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested furry windshields — the inner being a Movo one of rectangular box shape*, and the outer a custom Windcut one —, and it was placed on a full-size Zipshot tripod.

* Note that I WARN AGAINST use of windshields that are of any sort of box shape, for I soon found that they were inherently unsuitable for any decent-quality recording. While no doubt non-box-shaped windshields from Movo would be okay, the presence of relatively flat surfaces, edges and corners creates internal narrow resonance peaks in the treble, which give the latter an abrasive and rather 'screamy' quality, no matter who's made the particular windshields.  When I realized why my recordings had developed that nasty treble quality I had to go back through all recordings made with that dratted box-shaped windshield, and use Voxengo CurveEQ to enable me to precisely neutralize two narrow treble peaks and thus enable the recordings to sound wonderfully natural rather than bafflingly stressful.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshields and correction for the D100's weakness in very low bass — and then, later on, the aforementioned remedial EQ measure using Voxengo CurveEQ to remove the two narrow treble peaks kindly added by that rogue model of furry windshield.

Please remember to give this recording a rating — Thank you!