Media Artist, Educator, Maker of Things
…hydrophone for field recording. Scroll down for a table of commercially available hydrophones, prices, and specifications. Resonant or Flat? I classify hydrophones on a spectrum from resonant to flat. (All transducers resonate at a certain frequency, but in this case…
…Conclusion: Stick with silicone or soft rubber for electret hydrophones. II. Hack Commercial Products After years of extensive hydrophone experiments, Mike Rooke concluded that modifying commercial fish-finders or raw hydrophone elements has advantages over making a hydrophone from scratch. This…
…A quick “saucepan test”: http://www.zachpoff.com/site/audio/hydrophone-Test(Saucepan).mp3 Submerged in a sandy freshwater outlet that drains into the beach: http://www.zachpoff.com/site/audio/hydrophone-Rushing-Water.mp3 Buried in the sand (and loudly uprooted by a breaker): http://www.zachpoff.com/site/audio/hydrophone-Sand.mp3 Submerged in a tidal pool: http://www.zachpoff.com/site/audio/hydrophone-Tidal1.mp3 Submerged in another tidal pool: http://www.zachpoff.com/site/audio/hydrophone-Tidal2.mp3…
I’ve been building my own hydrophones for awhile, using them alongside inexpensive options from Aquarian Audio and JrF, but I always wondered how much of a difference I would hear with expensive professional hydrophones. I recently had the opportunity to…
…Remote booklet, published by Uniformbooks: Changelog December 2021 Replaced Raspberry Pi Streambox to improve uptime Replaced hydrophone. Stream restored to stereo October 2021 One hydrophone failed. Stream is mono until replaced. May 2021 Replaced (flooded) hydrophones with different design…
…Lerman’s “Travelon Gamelon” bicycle piece and his guide for contact-mic construction David Dunn shows how to build a hydrophone, tubular contact mic, and ultrasonic “probe mic” in this pdf. Open Music Labs has a very helpful page about piezo products…
…the “Commerical Contact Mics” section below. Aquarian Audio USA Hydrophone manufacturer with several preamps that work great with contact mics. The PA1 is less expensive and can be powered by the low-voltage “plug-in power” from small recorders. The PA-4 is…
Recently I was working on a hydrophone project and I needed to figure out how to disassemble an electret capsule and put it back together without ruining it. Robin Whittle has great photos, explanations, and specs concerning some specific capsules…
This page documents my experiments using inexpensive microphone capsules to record ultrasound signals. I tested several capsules using a 192kHz audio recorder and cheap piezo tweater. For each mic you’ll see a spectrograph showing a frequency sweep through the ultrasound…
…contact mics. http://www.zachpoff.com/site/audio/trio-for-rain-pots-contact-mics-excerpt.mp3 Sensor Workshop We taught a sensor-building workshop where participants made inexpensive hydrophones, contact mics, and light-listeners to plug into their portable recorders or smartphones. We kept it simple since it was the first time many of the…
I recently updated the D.I.Y. Resources section of this site: An LED lamp for my workbench made of flexible coolant hose Experiments with hacking FM transmitters to creat reliable short range radio links Adding synchronized digital sound to a Steenbeck…
VLF (Very Low Frequency) radio waves vibrate at frequencies that overlap the human hearing range, although we can’t directly hear them. (Our ears sense physical waves rather than electromagnetic ones.) VLF radio is filled with “natural radio” emissions. Every lightning…