Writhing sea and thundering breakers near Droskyn Point, Perranporth

Clifftop panorama of inspiring gutsy sea sound with loud and heavy breakers majestically riding in on the writhing sea. The acoustics of this patch significantly emphasize the thundering aspect of the sound of chunky waves breaking, so this is truly a spot to linger and enjoy the dramatic quality of the sea sound here.

I made this recording on 8 February 2017 on the clifftop just south-west of Droskyn Point, Perranporth, Cornwall, UK. The swell was coming in from the west, as usual, and giving me a suitably interesting panorama of sea movement, the waves coming in obliquely from left to right and and towards this cliff.

Advisory

Because of the soundscape's substantial dynamic range, to get a realistic sound level the playing volume needs to be set at some 3dB 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. The Droskyn Point Youth Hostel can just be made out on extreme right, almost on skyline.

Earlier photo (11 May 2015), from close to this day's recorder position (off to right / behind), with the waves coming in from the same direction, but smaller than on this occasion.

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.

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