I suppose these questions are about field recording techniques using hand held recorders.
I've got a Tascam DR 1 which I've had for about 3 years that I've never really used due to not really needing it. Lately I've began trying to use it again and I remember why I never played with it much. I tried to record a thunderstorm recently, and while the rain was at an acceptable quality, the thunder, well, you can hear a small sample here from an hour long recording:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/dsthef (just click download)
I don't get why it sounds terrible like that when the rain was fine; it completely drowns out the rain and pans back and forth in a unpleasing way. The thing is that the gain is ridiculously low; looking at a waveform of it shows that it is extremely quiet and is far (
far) from clipping, yet it sounds like the thunder is just overloading it and the DR 1 is freaking out about it. I'm pretty sure it's not wind because then it would happen all over the recording; it only happens when the thunder hits. I messed with settings like a low cut filter on the DR 1 for different recordings and it still persisted.
If I record something, I'll usually just set it on a chair and leave it for a bit. It seems to happen with anything I record with it; I'll have a recording of something quiet, and then as soon as something slightly louder comes in, it just covers up everything and sounds terrible. Maybe I'm wrong and this is how it's actually supposed to be.
Every recording of a thunderstorm I've heard sounded really good; you could hear the thunder against the rain. Any field recording I've heard have sounded pretty good as well. So I guess my question is how do you do field recordings with small hand held recorders that have mics built in? I just use the Tascam DR 1's built in mics, and I'm sure that they are actually not great and that is my problem. Am I expecting too much out of this thing and all hand held recorders?