A simple thought concerning
Freak369’s
Great Geek Write Off:
It is not the object that is geeky; it is the person who beholds the object which causes it to be “of geekness.”
Keeping that in mind, I would like you to consider the
Olympus WS-100 Digital Voice Recorder as my Excalibur in the Kingdom of Nerd. I promise you, dear readers, few people who posses the
Olympus WS-100 Digital Voice Recorder will use it for such noble dorkness as I do.
I bought the
Olympus WS-100 Digital Vice Recorder to aid me on paranormal investigations. You did just read that.
I’m a ghost hunter. I am one of those people like you see on tv that walks around in dark places with various tools looking for proof of the afterlife…. except I don’t have the several thousand dollars of camera equipment that you see on shows like
Ghost Hunters or
Most Haunted.
What I do have is this voice recorder. My favorite thing to do on investigations in try and capture EVP. EVP stands for
Electronic Voice Phenomenon. Essentially, I stand around with a voice recorder and ask various questions to the air and play back my recordings later to see if anything answered. Very recently someone in my group had a little girl’s voice answer, “Yes,” to several questions we asked near the site of a murder. EVP recording is creepy, fun stuff!
You need a fairly good recorder to capture EVP. A regular tape recorder isn’t recommended because you will often pick up the sound of the gears turning the tape on playback. Other things I looked for when selecting my recorder was long recording time and the ability to easily transfer it to my computer where I could review and edit it as needed.
The Olympus WS-100 Digital Voice Recorder satisfied all of these needs.
Functionality:
This recorder is small, thin, and lightweight. On an investigation I already have a camera and sometimes a giant flashlight on me so something I can easily tuck into my pocket was important. The buttons are small but not unusable, with most of the functions being on a raised panel on the side for easier access. My favorite feature is the “hold” switch that when flipped prevents me from accidentally pushing the wrong button when I am fleeing for my life down a dark hallway from the boogie man. The other nice thing about the
Olympus WS-100 Digital Voice Recorder is that it splits in half to reveal it’s USB connector that is built into the model instead of having just one more cord I have to deal with. As of having the
Olympus WS-100 for two months, it seems very durable. It is housed in my purse that eats lipstick and pens like a hungry dragon, and so far it doesn’t have a scratch on it.
The Technical Jargon:
This recorder offers 27 hours of recording time in LP mode for those ghost hunters that plan out longer investigations. They say it lasts over 13 hours with one AAA battery, but ghosts tend to zap the juice from all electrical equipment, so I often bring along an extra set. So far the longest I have had it go without a new battery was bout seven hours.
There is a voice activation feature, but I found that it doesn’t suit my purposes. What I do like, however, is that you can index your recordings to make playback easier. You can store and organize files in five folders and hold up to 199 files per folder. I like to start a new segment every time I enter into a new room or area on an investigation, and this has made reviewing my tapes much easier. It also means that I can erase single files so if I accidentally record myself signing along to Tool in the shower or something I don’t have to go back and edit it on my computer. It also has 64 MB of flash memory, and it also works as a mass USB storage device meaning the
Olympus WS-100 can hold a lot more for you than sound.
How Does It Sound?
It records in Windows Media, but I usually transfer my files to iTunes so it will convert them to workable MP3s that I can transfer to my sound editing programs. I have noticed that some of the louder things (like a person yelling, “Holy crap! What just touched my arm?”) come up a bit robotic or digitized sounding, but this recorder was able to pick up voices and sounds very clearly that were sometimes in the other room or far away. It minimizes “dead air” noise and records voices very well. Beyond ghost hunting, I recently used this recorder to capture several lectures at a book festival, and even from my seat in the fifth and sometimes tenth row, I was able to effectively record what the lecturer had to say.
Have You Captured Concrete Proof that Ghosts Exist with the Olympus WS-100?
I have some fairly disturbing whispering going on whenever a particular member of my group speaks in one recording that was not audible when the recording was made. In another file I also have what sounds like a baby crying several times over, and we were in the middle of the woods late at night when I made that recording. As always, however, the paranormal field is a highly speculative field and not an exact science, so geeks like me must take our
Olympus WS-100 Voice Recorders and continue collecting evidence!
(A link to the W/O post:
http://www.epinions.com/msg/show_~threads/cat_id_~121/id_~7126/forum_id_~441)
