SimonViklund
Active Member
Years ago I saw this SoundWorks documentary about creating the sounds for the 2014 film "Godzilla", and was utterly fascinated by the concept of capturing ultrasounds and pitch them down to bring frequencies previously unperceivable to human hearing into audible range. You can see a short bit about it at 2:45 into the documentary, and almost four minutes of more in-depth talk and footage at 36:18.
Pitching down ultrasounds is like opening a portal to an unexplored sonic dimension and again, I'm utterly fascinated by the idea. I have, however, never pursued getting the gear needed to do this - which brings me to my question: What hardware is actually needed to record ultrasounds and what software can be used to process it?
In the documentary, you can see the sound designers for Godzilla used a Sanken CO-100K and a Sound Devices 722 portable digital recorder (no longer available), and you can see them using SoundMiner V4Pro (the current version of the software is V5Pro) to audition the recordings. As far as I know SoundMiner is not used to actually process audio, but still. Then I read this post here on VI Control where @charlieclouser states that in order to record ultrasounds with the Sanken CO-100K, it needs to be paired with a preamp that has the same frequency capacity. He suggested an Earthworks ZDT preamp.
What recording device available today could be used to bring out the Sanken mic's full potential? Do you really need a dedicated preamp in the $1k-1.5k price range?
Where does the Nyquist sampling criterion come into play? 200 kHz is needed to record and reproduce 100 kHz sounds, right? AFAIK there is no mass produced equipment that goes to 200 kHz so you have to settle for 192 kHz - which is usually more than enough - but since the Sanken mic captures 100 kHz and you need to record at twice that frequency to capture everything the mic picks up, there's really some sounds that get lost when you record at 192 kHz rather than 200 kHz, correct? So because the recording equipment and DAWs all cap at 192 kHz, the Sanken mic can really "only" be used record sounds up to 96 kHz. It's a minute detail but I'm just asking to see if I've understood all of this correctly. Forgive my ignorance if I've misunderstood how all of this actually works.
Regarding software: Reaper projects can be set to 192 kHz - does that mean that I could bring the ultrasound recordings made with the Sanken mic into Reaper, with no audio quality loss, and pitch it down and process it? Despite the fact that the Reaper project is set at 192 kHz, the audio interface can be set at 48 kHz - since it doesn't need to actually reproduce anything beyond the frequency range of human hearingis - right? Again, forgive my ignorance.
Pitching down ultrasounds is like opening a portal to an unexplored sonic dimension and again, I'm utterly fascinated by the idea. I have, however, never pursued getting the gear needed to do this - which brings me to my question: What hardware is actually needed to record ultrasounds and what software can be used to process it?
In the documentary, you can see the sound designers for Godzilla used a Sanken CO-100K and a Sound Devices 722 portable digital recorder (no longer available), and you can see them using SoundMiner V4Pro (the current version of the software is V5Pro) to audition the recordings. As far as I know SoundMiner is not used to actually process audio, but still. Then I read this post here on VI Control where @charlieclouser states that in order to record ultrasounds with the Sanken CO-100K, it needs to be paired with a preamp that has the same frequency capacity. He suggested an Earthworks ZDT preamp.
What recording device available today could be used to bring out the Sanken mic's full potential? Do you really need a dedicated preamp in the $1k-1.5k price range?
Where does the Nyquist sampling criterion come into play? 200 kHz is needed to record and reproduce 100 kHz sounds, right? AFAIK there is no mass produced equipment that goes to 200 kHz so you have to settle for 192 kHz - which is usually more than enough - but since the Sanken mic captures 100 kHz and you need to record at twice that frequency to capture everything the mic picks up, there's really some sounds that get lost when you record at 192 kHz rather than 200 kHz, correct? So because the recording equipment and DAWs all cap at 192 kHz, the Sanken mic can really "only" be used record sounds up to 96 kHz. It's a minute detail but I'm just asking to see if I've understood all of this correctly. Forgive my ignorance if I've misunderstood how all of this actually works.
Regarding software: Reaper projects can be set to 192 kHz - does that mean that I could bring the ultrasound recordings made with the Sanken mic into Reaper, with no audio quality loss, and pitch it down and process it? Despite the fact that the Reaper project is set at 192 kHz, the audio interface can be set at 48 kHz - since it doesn't need to actually reproduce anything beyond the frequency range of human hearingis - right? Again, forgive my ignorance.
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