It Was God Equipment Review

I want to give a run down of the hodge-podge of equipment that God used because He obviously wanted His message through Adrian Despres distributed from October 2nd. First was the very acoustically live, concrete block building in which the service was conducted. Not the best place for a recording with its many reverberations.

Next Adrian was speaking into a Audio-Technica ATW-T31 wireless lavaliere microphone which was transmitting to the ATW-R10 diversity receiver. This wireless microphone system is one of my least favorites that I inherited but that day it performed almost flawlessly. The receiver lost signal a couple of brief moments but other than that I was very pleased. The microphone has a very low gain before feedback threshold so I was amazed at how well it performed. It was God!

The wireless microphone system was connected to a Mackie CFX20 live sound mixer. The Lord has really looked out for this board in the fact that it has suffered through two major roof leaks and is still getting the mix done. The only thing that doesn’t work on this mixer is the headphone jack and some unbalanced ¼ inputs are suspect. It is and continues to be God!

Next is the recorder that we purchase this year to finally get away from cassettes. It is most certainly not high end. So far I have found that the spoken word is really good but I need to play with it some more to get music sounding better. I’m speaking of the Fostex MR-8 digital multi-track recorder. I usually can be proficient with a piece of equipment straight out of the box but this one took some manual reading. I have not put it through the paces due to time constraints but it has made recording our worship services much, much easier. It also brings us out of the dark ages of using cassettes which did not give us the capability of recording to other formats. The ease of having removable recording media such as the compact flash memory that this recorder uses it a definite plus. God used it!

My computer is a HP 845n but the star is the software that I have come to love in a very short period of time. There is a couple of audio editing software that I have been using and I have come to the conclusion that I like them both. The first is Audacity. Audacity is a FREE program written by a team of volunteer developers around the world. It works with many operating systems including Windows, Linux, Mac and more. It supports many different audio formats including .wav and .mp3. Not only is it an editor but it is also a player and recorder. Audacity has a vast array of effects including echo, compression and limiter, filtering and many more. Another great feature is unlimited undo. YES! The only problem that I have had with Audacity is exporting the project as an .mp3 file. It can’t locate the necessary files for conversion.
The other great editor I have used is Nero Wave Editor. It is more visually appealing than Audacity with the graphic equivalent of knobs and faders like a tangible digital recorder. Nero does not have nearly the effects that Audacity has. One great feature of Nero is the automatic crash recovery. Both have been more than adequate for what I do. We will see how they fair once I can use them more extensively. Regardless of which editor I use, I convert to .mp3 using dBpower AMP music converter. This software is Freeware and is packed with wave and mp3 codecs with capability to download virtually any codec you need. It has many features like adjustable frequency and bitrate and preset quality settings, DSP effects and volume normalizing. Nice little utility.

Last but not least is Nero Burning Rom 6 to burn the CDs. Very easy to use with drag and drop files into the window for burning. I’m also pleased with the speed and quality of the burns. It also has the capability of video but I have not tried that yet. This software has many features that I have not yet begun to tap into yet. Click here for a full listing of features.

As you can see none of this is high-end, state-of-the-art, quality equipment. Some of this equipment should not even work anymore. I keep it maintained the best I can with the ability that God has given me but sometimes it performs way beyond what I ever expected because God wants to use it anyway.

I’m just happy to be along for the ride because I love doing this stuff. I’m so glad that God gives me the opportunity work in media ministry!