River Teign and distant dawn chorus from Sharp Tor, Teign Gorge — Part 1

Pure peace and a great sleep-assist soundscape! — But in addition a widely spacious and distant birds' dawn chorus unfolds, starting with a very quiet prelude from the odd nightjars. This is the first of two parts.

This was a repeat on 23 June 2016 of the dawn chorus recording from this spot on 20 June 2014. I wanted to capture the sound more faithfully than I could get from the PCM-M10 recorder that I used then, and on this session with a D100 instead I'd get a really lifelike panorama, but a little back from the edge to reduce the higher frequencies in the river sound so that as much as possible of the distant birdsong could be heard.

Advisory:
This really is a very quiet soundscape, so I recommend going easy with the volume control.

The Sharp Tor dawn chorus recording of this session.

The Sharp Tor crag, from the Hunter's path just to the east of it. The arrow points to the recorder on its tripod for the 2014 dawn chorus recorder, which is clearly visible in the full-resolution version of this image, while the little patch of valley fog is in the Chagford area, and high Dartmoor forms the distant skyline.

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 mini-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!