Testing new laptops

  • 560x300

    January 2025


    It's always made clear to me, that I am not the one in control of capturing EVP voices. This is even more evident when testing out new equipment. While I might think I am well practiced and know how my devices work, introducing a new variable concerns me that I'm wasting time and moving away from a tried and tested platform. Sometimes it's a dead end, and then there are times when it pays off.

    The two old Toshiba L300 laptops arrived in the post. The box was battered, as was their appearance. One worked fine, the other had to be reformatted and a new hard drive purchased. I wasn't at all confident that this model would work for EVP as both are older than my regular archive of Toshiba and completely without frills.

    Continuing on from previous experiments, I wanted to compare how the laptops would process recordings from both the cassette tape machine and the VN2100. The results surprised me, greatly.

    Usually, the Olympus digital recorder delivers a greater amount of voices, with good clarity. Processing recordings on the new laptops, the VN2100 was noticably less able to perform than the cassette tape. Voices on the tape were captured in classes A to C. The VN2100 produced only five grade C voices on the new laptop.

    What was most surprising was when I tried uploading the recordings to the regular laptops used for analysis, historically these have provided excellent results in all tests, but not this time. The recordings were almost unlistenable, despite filtering, I made the decision not to review them. Any isolates would have been highly questionable and already having spent many hours of reviewing I was weary.

    Further testing will be done and field recordings will be uploaded in parallel to both old and new laptops, for comparison. Wish me luck.

    All of the clips presented here were recorded on cassette tape, that was transferred onto the new laptops, before being reviewed and cleaned in Audition.



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