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…
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…
…A quick “saucepan test”: https://zachpoff.com/audio/hydrophone-Test(Saucepan).mp3 Submerged in a sandy freshwater outlet that drains into the beach: https://zachpoff.com/audio/hydrophone-Rushing-Water.mp3 Buried in the sand (and loudly uprooted by a breaker): https://zachpoff.com/audio/hydrophone-Sand.mp3 Submerged in a tidal pool: https://zachpoff.com/audio/hydrophone-Tidal1.mp3 Submerged in another tidal pool: https://zachpoff.com/audio/hydrophone-Tidal2.mp3…
…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…
…diversity. Mitigation is underway. Fingers crossed! June 2023 Switched streaming server infrastructure to increase reiability Re-positioned hydrophones for better sound Replaced right-channel hydrophone April 2023 Replaced one broken hydrophone, using 2 part urethane coating instead of plast-dip. Fixed buzzing noise…
…see Choosing a Hydrophone For Field Recording for general advice on underwater field recording and a big comparison table of commercially available hydrophones.) HTI 92-WB ($1350 +) This hydrophone isn’t marketed for field recording. It’s more of a custom product…
…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 (including the discs commonly used…
(This page is part of a series. See the rest of my contact microphone pages here. I also have a similar page about Choosing a Hydrophone for Field Recording.) I’ve been experimenting with contact microphones for years, slowly refining my…
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…
…contact mics. https://zachpoff.com/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…
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…
…Dip the finished mic in Plasti-Dip (or similar liquid rubber coating) to waterproof it. The soft rubber has less effect on the frequency response than I expected, but it will reduce the treble. (It probably won’t make a good hydrophone….