Sea pandemonium and deep booms in cliff alcove by Droskyn Point, Perranporth

It's pandemonium time as each wave piles into this narrow-cut cliff alcove, trying to rebound outwards, fighting against further incoming waves as it does so. The booms from the caves / fissures therein are satisfyingly deep and heavy.

I made this recording on 22 January 2017 on yet another hike from Portreath to Perranporth.

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.

An earlier recording (17 March 2015) taking place at the same spot. Yes, it is pretty exposed there, with some risk of loss of recorder! Droskyn Point Youth Hostel just visible near top of photo.

Impressive ruggedness of the cliff alcove, which has been cut into sea caves and a whole range of clefts, complete with blowhole. The high-level 'cave' would be an adit.

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!