Subsequently, I have listened to a lot of recordings from phones and have never really felt they matched the quality you could get from even an inexpensive voice recorder. This isn't surprising because the microphones in telephones are really only designed to capture the narrow range of frequencies of the human voice.
So, I got a new phone (LG G3) a few months back and was out recording frogs (as usual). Just to update my perceptions, I held my phone out the window right next to my $1K recording rig (Sennheiser K6/ME66 microphone into a Tascam DR-680 recorder). When I got home and compared the two recordings, I was shocked to see hom much better my phone recording was than any recordings I had made with older phones (Motorola Razr series, Iphone 4, etc).
Here is a few seconds of the two recordings back to back. It is exactly the same section of recording played twice. One is from the phone, the other from the semi-pro recording gear.
Can you hear the difference?
Another way to tell the difference is to look at the spectrogram to look for noise in the recording:
Can you tell which one is which? Pretty tough.
The first recording is with the phone, the second with the Tascam/Sennheiser combo.
Clearly this phone can make good recordings if used well.
Here are a few tips to help make good recordings with a phone -
- Have a good phone and a good app.
- Get as close as you can to the calling frog or chorus.
- Block the wind from making noise on your phone.
- Hold the phone very still/carefully. Better yet, set it down on a surface so your movements don't get picked up as noise.