My apology for not expanding on voice activation.
Thank you Jim for the recognition and asking why. You forced to reexamine the plethora of reasons I advise against such an action. Often I forget reasons why I discontinue a practice.
Both Vlawde and Mac are spot on with their analogy. Voice activation typically requires some prompting to start although the exception would be certain higher end units. Remember that they are KEYED for amplitude/frequency response of the human voice and we are dealing with something entirely different.
Look at some of the problematic issues/enigmas we are dealing with:
- A person hears a voice, records it and yet it fails to be recorded. Our perception of what we THINK we hear might not always be auditory. A number of times this has happened in my research/investigation and in some case experienced collectively.
- The fingerprint of AVP/EVP is often observed in the lower noise floor. Both frequency response and amplitude is significantly reduced comparatively to a human voice. If you are not actively monitoring and it is not recorded on the audio device because of lack of sensitivity, how will you ever know there was evidence lost in the first place?
- Please revisit the many examples on how people cheap on buying low end equipment. You indicated you found a recorder that had no delay but it cost $140.00. How many want to spend that type of money on a recorder.
Example, even yourself, I recommended the Samson H2N for $140 and you wanted to buy something substantially less. You finally settled on a $100 recorder but your original intent was to spend around $60. Your pattern is shared among many and this is an observation and not a criticism sir.
Realizing of course that one cannot always commit to these activities because “real life” will always take the spotlight, there really is not a lot of room for shortcuts in this field. Lack of control and focus will only lead to more unanswered questions subtracting from purpose.
My mentor referred to this as “laziness” and from day one 15 years ago he stressed, “No shortcuts.” I have this burned into my mantra of investigation. I'm not always happy with the extra work but I keep repeating, "No shortcuts."