Media Artist, Educator, Maker of Things
…hydrophone for field recording. Scroll down for a table of commercially available hydrophones, prices, and specifications. Resonant or Flat? I classify hydrophones on a spectrum from resonant to flat. (All transducers resonate at a certain frequency, but in this case…
…or permanently) Replaced left hydrophone that developed cable problem Fixed night time recording (was restarting constantly) May 2025 Replaced hydrophone due to beaver attack! Fixed telemetry problem and replaced Raspberry Pi SD card September 2023 Rebuilt hydrophone tripods so they…
I’ve been building my own hydrophones for awhile, using them alongside inexpensive options from Aquarian Audio and JrF, but I always wondered how much of a difference I would hear with expensive professional hydrophones. I recently had the opportunity to…
…A quick “saucepan test”: https://zachpoff.com/audio/hydrophone-Test(Saucepan).mp3 Submerged in a sandy freshwater outlet that drains into the beach: https://zachpoff.com/audio/hydrophone-Rushing-Water.mp3 Buried in the sand (and loudly uprooted by a breaker): https://zachpoff.com/audio/hydrophone-Sand.mp3 Submerged in a tidal pool: https://zachpoff.com/audio/hydrophone-Tidal1.mp3 Submerged in another tidal pool: https://zachpoff.com/audio/hydrophone-Tidal2.mp3…
…Conclusion: Stick with silicone or soft rubber for electret hydrophones. II. Hack Commercial Products After years of extensive hydrophone experiments, Mike Rooke concluded that modifying commercial fish-finders or raw hydrophone elements has advantages over making a hydrophone from scratch. This…
…see Choosing a Hydrophone For Field Recording for general advice on underwater field recording and a big comparison table of commercially available hydrophones.) HTI 92-WB ($1350 +) This hydrophone isn’t marketed for field recording. It’s more of a custom product…
…and his guide for contact-mic construction David Dunn shows how to build a hydrophone, tubular contact mic, and ultrasonic “probe mic” in this pdf Open Music Labs has a very helpful page about piezo products (including the discs commonly used…
(This page is part of a series. See the rest of my contact microphone pages here. I also have a similar page about Choosing a Hydrophone for Field Recording.) I’ve been experimenting with contact microphones for years, slowly refining my…
Recently I was working on a hydrophone project and I needed to figure out how to disassemble an electret capsule and put it back together without ruining it. Robin Whittle has great photos, explanations, and specs concerning some specific capsules…
…contact mics. https://zachpoff.com/audio/trio-for-rain-pots-contact-mics-excerpt.mp3 Sensor Workshop We taught a sensor-building workshop where participants made inexpensive hydrophones, contact mics, and light-listeners to plug into their portable recorders or smartphones. We kept it simple since it was the first time many of the…
This page documents my experiments using inexpensive microphone capsules to record ultrasound signals. I tested several capsules using a 192kHz audio recorder and cheap piezo tweater. For each mic you’ll see a spectrograph showing a frequency sweep through the ultrasound…
…make it a battery-powered portable projection instrument Wiki: Build a portable Magic Lantern projection system for proto-cinema experiments Wiki: Build a portable 8-channel sound system and 8×8 matrix mixer Journal: Phase 1 (February 2023) I’m amazed by the breadth and…