Category: Audio

My wife and I did some hiking in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado this week. Here are two short recordings of a couple mountain streams from our hikes. I always enjoy the sounds of rivers and streams in the mountains and the different sounds they make.

The first was a fairly slow running stream. The second was a bit faster.

I was a bit surprised at the lack of sound in the parts of the mountains we were in. Birds and such were sparse at best and we encountered few streams. The most common sound was the silence of nature. Much as I enjoyed it, it certainly does not make for compelling recording. These two short samples will have to do from this trip.

In these two recordings you hear water running. The first is quieter with a gentle flowing sound. The water is noticeably louder in the second and sounds as though it is running more rapidly.

Warning: The audio linked to inn this post has multiple explosive sounds and they do start at the beginning and some can be loud.

Over the holiday weekend I was at a family cottage at Tuttle Lake in Wisconsin. Each 4th of July weekend, there is a sizable private fireworks display put on by some cottage owners at the lake.

This year, I captured some of the audio and find the sounds of fireworks over open water an interesting sound. I don’t have the audio equipment to capture the full sound field or the way the concussions echo around the lake but this is still an interesting sound. The fireworks are shot from across the lake, pretty much in a direct line of sight to the end of the dock I was sitting on to capture this.

In this audio you can hear the lingering echos of the explosions but live, you can hear them really sort of move around the lake.

With all that’s going on in the world, I do have to wonder too how these same explosions and yells could be the sounds of war and terror. I feel very fortunate to live where I do and not have had to experience the horror of war directly.

I know there are people on all sides of the political spectrum but will say I hope we can all find a way to come together and protect the people of our country, the institutions of the U.S. Government and work to make life better for the people and planet. It is far from perfect and I know firsthand many of the ways we need to improve but this is the world we have and I hope we can all remember we need to share it with each other and our future.

A bit of hard drive cleaning had me sifting through some of the random audio I’ve captured over the years. So if the internet allows one to cater to self-indulgent delights of sharing information others may or may not find interesting, here are just a few sounds from the past few years. Use the links at the end of each description to play the audio.

Cape Foulweather on the Oregon Coast

The Oregon coast is one of my favorite places. The power and majesty of the Pacific merge with forests that smell so fresh at numerous hiking destinations. It is always a treat to be standing on the edge of land with the waves crashing below you. I find that sound experience just breathtaking and Cape Foulweather is one of the best for this.

Cape Foulweather

Baseball Foul Ball

Last year I treated a brother and myself to some tickets right behind home plate at a Seattle Mariners game. We were three rows off the field and pretty much directly behind home plate. What a lucky catch on my part to be recording a bit of game audio when a player fouled one off the screen which was probably no more than 10 feet in front of us. I love the reaction from fans around us too.

Baseball Foul Ball

Natural Bridge Caverns

The Natural Bridge Caverns in Texas make for an interesting shorter walk through some underground caverns. The rooms are quite large and you hear water dripping and running throughout much of the walk.

Natural Bridge Caverns

Crows Gone Wild

One afternoon some crows just went absolutely wild in the backyard. It was like something out of a horror movie. They kept on like what you hear in the audio here for about 30 minutes.

Crows Gone Wild

At both home and work I use several computers and have grown tired of the clutter from multiple sets of speakers filling my desk. Still, there are times when I want to hear the audio from more than one computer at a time, so don’t want to use the typical switchbox connections for switching computer audio along with keyboards and monitors.

After exploring various options, the solution that has worked well for me is The Belkin Rockstar. It is nothing fancy and primarily intended to plug multiple headphones into a single audio device. But audio being what it is, it is just as easy to use the unit to connect multiple audio sources to a single set of speakers. At just under $12 from Amazon, along with some audio cables from Deep Surplus, the entire solution cost me less than $20.

This is definitely a low-tech solution. Anyone who works with audio will recognize one of the limitations of this solution is that the more devices you connect to a simple device like the Rockstar, the lower the volume of all the devices ends up being. Audio quality does not degrade though with this setup beyond the volume level. For me the system has been working well for several months and works well even when multiple computers are producing speech at the same time.

You can connect a total of five sound sources to the Rockstar and one set of speakers. The device comes with one audio cable ending in a standard male 3.5mm (1/8″) jack hard wired into it. When used for the default purpose of connecting multiple headphones, this is the cable you would connect to the audio source you want to share. When using the Rockstar, as I am to connect multiple sound sources, whatever audio source you connect to this hard wired cable has the loudest audio in the resulting configuration. There are five 3.5mm female ports on the device. Use four for additional audio sources and one to connect speakers or headphones—whatever you want to use to listen to your computer audio.