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This is an archived webpage and is no longer updated.

For current information please visit our website at:

micbooster.com

Wildlife and Nature Recording

Wildlife recording often pushes recording equipment and science to its limits. The recordist needs to work often with high gain, maximum recording level, with minimum noise contributed by the equipment. Unless you have your own porter it also helps if the equipment is light and compact.

The FEL MicBooster and 3.5 Series preamps can both help in these situations. They both work by amplifying the microphone signal by a relatively small amount (20-40 dB depending on model) before feeding the signal into the microphone input of the recorder. The amplification is very low noise and high quality, you can think of it as just increasing the signal level out of the microphone. We call it Front End Lift and we thought it was so good, we named the business after it.

There are two specific benefits from this:

• The extra gain from the preamp is of very high quality and low noise, often better than that of the recorder (particularly portable domestic recorders). So with a preamp in circuit giving 20 dB of clean low-noise gain you can reduce the recording level and also the noise contribution from the recorder's own preamp.
• You have extra gain - if you had been working with the record level at maximum, now you can back off a little as you effectively have an extra sensitive mic.

The FEL 3.5 Series preamps are designed to work with portable domestic recorders, normally Minidisc or DAT, sometimes cassette or video recorders, they are tiny, light use no batteries and have no switches or controls on them. The preamps all have a stereo 3.5mm mini jack plug to go into the mic socket of the recorder.

The FEL MicBoosters are designed for use with professional recorders which have XLR inputs and also phantom power.

There is lots of information on the web about nature and wildlife recording, some of the better sources are below:

Yahoo Naturerecordists Group

How to Get Started in NATURE RECORDING by John Neville

The Wildlife Sound Recording Society is based in the UK and is a great source of information and support.

FEL Communications