It’s been sixteen years since I bought a videocamera to record the exploits of our brand-new baby girl. It was a Sony Handycam, a wonder of miniaturization that recorded onto mini DV cassettes. Even more amazing than its compact size and light weight — a mere two pounds! — was its ability to export the recordings in a digital format, which meant that I could plug the camera into a computer, upload the footage, and edit my own home movies.
That little Sony cost a fortune, but I liked the idea of buying the most advanced technology I could afford, since I planned to keep the camera for a good long time. In Nina’s early years, we gave the camera a workout, and it still works perfectly today, although modern High Definition television standards have made it more or less a dinosaur.
These days, the very idea of owning a stand-alone videocamera is virtually obsolete, its archival function having been all but replaced by the smart phone. Why lug around a hoary old camera when you can simply aim a phone at your kid and instantly share the footage on the Web?
Of course, smart phones have limitations. For instance, their tiny microphones aren’t very good at recording music. Since our baby girl is now sixteen and has reached the point in her cello career where she’s starting to play real repertoire, I thought it was high time to invest in a videocamera that would be able to capture the full dynamic range of an instrumental performance.
My research led me to another Sony product, the HDR-MV1 Music Video Recorder, a device with very stripped down video capability — there’s no zoom, for instance, simply a fixed, wide-angle lens — but with a pair of highly sensitive microphones designed to deliver excellent audio recordings.
I was prepared for sticker shock, but something miraculous has happened in the world of videocameras: they’re cheap! It shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did, since a decline in the price of high-tech gear is one of the givens of the digital age, but my new videocamera cost less than a fifth as much as the old one.
Another given is the ever-shrinking size of these devices. The HDR-MV1 looks like a fat smart phone. Gone are the days of magnetic tape; today’s videocameras have no moving parts at all! Instead, they record directly into flash memory. The HDR-MV1 uses a microSD flash card, a thumbnail-sized bit of plastic that can store 64 gigabytes of material.
In the world of HD video, which gobbles up memory at an astonishing rate, I suppose 64 gigabytes isn’t all that much. But to put it in perspective, that’s about the amount of memory it would take to store 1000 CDs.
Powered by a rechargeable lithium-ion battery the size of an after-dinner mint, the HDR-MV1 can record two hours of HD video and then transfer that huge file to a smartphone or computer wirelessly, using its built-in Wi-fi.
(Did I mention that it can be remotely controlled with a smartphone?)
While your head is whirling with the capabilities of this miracle of technology, I’d like to direct your attention to Exhibit B, another piece of recording equipment that arrived at our doorstep this week: the Gakken Premium Gramophone Kit, a working model of an early Victor Talking Machine.
I like to build things with Nina, and given her interest in the history of music, I thought it might be fun to explore the roots of recording technology with her.
Perhaps you’re old enough to remember the famous “His Master’s Voice” logo featuring Nipper, a fox terrier staring quizzically into the horn of a hand-wound gramophone. The Gakken kit makes a small, plastic, clockwork-powered version of that early HMV gramophone, capable of playing 78s, 45s, and 33s. Even more astonishing is its ability to inscribe a recording onto plastic-coated disks — even onto the smooth side of a discarded CD!
The recordings are limited to a minute or so. The fidelity is terrible. But there’s magic in imagining the path of the sound waves traveling from your lips, through the conical horn, and onto the circular diaphragm above the metal needle, causing it to quiver and incise shallow grooves in the plastic. Afterwards, when you’ve switched to a bamboo needle to protect the fragile grooves, and the faint, ghostly sound you just recorded comes wafting from the horn, you might experience some of the wonderment that Thomas Edison felt in 1877 listening to the very first recording made by his newly invented phonograph: the nursery rhyme “Mary had a little lamb,” shouted at the top of his lungs.
Why he chose “Mary had a little lamb” as the inaugural recording, we’ll never know. Perhaps he was thinking of his daughter Marion, who was a toddler at the time, and wondering how his new invention might capture her voice — and the voice of daughters everywhere — for future generations.
