Loud regular surf by Chapel Porth, St Agnes, Cornwall

This is a 'regular' surf, without the sort of high dramatics that I usually seek out, from a fairly low clifftop on the western flank of Mulgram Hill, by Chapel Porth, St Agnes, Cornwall, UK — and thus could readily be an excellent sleeping aid.

At a 'normal' listening volume it sounds to be a vague and uneventful mush of sound, but at the correct volume it begins to sound impressive, especially through high-grade headphones, with a thundering quality and plenty of very low frequencies — and at that level the breaking of individual waves becomes more apparent, though nothing like in my later recording from this spot ( https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/680390/ ).

As the tide goes out, the general roar of wave run-out increasingly masks the sound of individual waves breaking.

This was made during an extended lunch stop on a walk from Porthtowan to Perranporth on 18 February 2017. The swell was reasonably chunky (forecast as about 2 metres), and was to give much better dramatics for recording nearer Perranporth.

Advisory

Because of the soundscape's big dynamic range, to get a realistic sound level the playing volume needs to be set at some 6dB above a normal sensible level. In addition, high-grade headphones are strongly recommended in order to hear all the detail and reproduce the very low frequencies reasonably correctly.

This recording taking place, looking roughly SSW. This is NOT the official Coast Path, but an exposed and potentially dangerous contouring track at the bottom of the steep cliff slope, hugging the cliff edge.

This recording taking place, looking roughly NNE towards St Agnes Head (the latter actually hidden by the Carn Gowla headland).

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!