Aural

Radio Journalism Gear

Best basic recording toolkit

[Transom Story Workshop teaches new students how to create narrative stories for radio. The kind of short stories you might hear on NPR. Their tech guy, Jeff Towne, posts a current recommendation list of the best basic radio journalism tools. He keeps up with testing out new gear and is always the place I (KK) go to find the best inexpensive recording gear. This updates their previous recommendations.]

Students at the Transom Story Workshop tend to be beginners. Many have never picked up a mic or turned on a recorder before. So, it was important for us to choose a field recording pack that both sounded good and was simple for novices to use. Plus, since the workshop started from scratch in the fall of 2011, we needed to find gear that fit our start-up budget. We landed on the following and feel we made the right choices:

sonyRecorder: The Sony M10 ($209). We can’t say enough about how good this recorder sounds. It’s VERY quiet. And, it has a solid, built-in limiter. Those two components were important to us when selecting a recorder for students because new producers often don’t pay close attention to the levels. Having a quiet recorder and a good limiter helps a student make better recordings. I would have preferred, maybe, the Sony D50. It seems more durable. But, the M10 is solid, lightweight, and has fewer bells and whistles to learn — and it’s half the price.

micMics: We have a slew of mics on hand for the students including the Electro-Voice RE-50 ($169), the Beyer-Dynamic MC-58 and MCE-58, and the Audio Technica AT8010. I’m a fan of the RE-50 and the MC-58 for new producers because they are more forgiving of mic handling noise. But, all of these are excellent mics.

headsetHeadphones: For the price — $28 — the Sennheiser HD202 is a good set of “cans.” They help isolate external sound, they’re fairly comfortable, and they reproduce sound well. Yeah, they aren’t the Sony MDR-7506s we love, but we were on a budget and everyone is happy with these headphones. Never a problem.

-- Jeff Towne 02/21/14

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