Equipment we use

Digital & Analogue Recorders/Dictafones

In this category there are several options equipment-wise each with certain benefits and disadvantages. Good old analogue tape recorders/dictaphones are excellent in terms of EVP capture as the frequency range captured is wide and the recordings are usually hiss-free however using tapes is quite frankly a pain and you can forget about putting your results on your pc unless you own the necessary equipment. Digital dictaphones are the next option, these discreet recording devices are somewhat costlier than their tape based counterparts but negate the need to keep a stock of tapes. The recordings are generally acceptable for investigation purposes and can be easily transferred to a pc however they do tend to suffer from a narrower frequency range than their tape counterparts and hiss can be evident. Basically if these are your preferred option go for those that offer high quality recordings without compression. Perhaps one the better devices to capture EVP is a mini-disc recorder. These benefit from the advantages of the both analogue tape recorders and digital voice recorders. A bonus and a shortcoming of these is that they have come down significantly in price due to the popularity of MP3 devices, but that lack of popularity means that the media discs they use may well become hard to find. However they usually allow for a mic out and quite often sport a PC link ( usually USB ) to allow easy sharing/storing of your recordings. Some MP3 devices also allow for recording but at this stage most models available are primarily for playback and the very nature of MP3 as a codec is to low a quality for serious capture of auditory phenomena.