Gentle sea dramatics at cave entrance, Beeny Cliff south end
<b>Relatively gentle reverberant altercations between sea, cliff clefts and prominences, and the cave interior, with the ongoing trickling sound of a minor streamlet in foreground, tumbling over the slabby slate rocks and over the cliff edge right in front of us. A wonderful dark and menacing reverberance imparted by the cave and the immediate cliff surrounds of the cave's vestibule area, with a lot of gentle and very deep booming and rumbling from within the cave, with a curiously darker quality than equivalent cave booms / rumbles I've heard elsewhere.</b>
<b>For this recording we're precariously overlooking the vestibule area of the southernmost of the caves on the more or less west-facing part of Beeny Cliff, near Boscastle, Cornwall, UK on 11 March 2017.</b>
It was a fairly dangerous operation on this occasion, because of that trickling streamlet, which spread out as it landed on the little exposed ledge, rendering most of the rock slab area there more or less wet and slippery. A slip there could have landed me in the sea below, with almost certain death into the bargain! — Evidently I recognised the hazard and took great care, being prepared at any point to edge back in a careful retreat. (Or, of course I'm a bogeyman come back to haunt the world!) In fact I doubt if I would put myself in such a position again in such wet and slippery conditions, as I have poorer balance now (2023, age 80) and generally have less confidence in very exposed situations.
<b>Advisory</b>
High-grade headphones are strongly recommended in order to get the best out of this complex soundscape and reproduce the very low frequencies reasonably correctly. Most of the booms / rumbles would pass more or less unnoticed through many speaker systems. Also, I found the streamlet sound a little wearying on my computer speakers (AudioEngine A2+), but it sounded sweet and beautiful (as it did <i>in loco</i>) through my Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones.
<img alt="Earlier recording from this position" src="https://www.broad-horizon-nature.co.uk/170311-161002_recording_sea_and_cave_booms,_southernmost_cave_beeny_cliff.jpg">
<i>An earlier recording being made from this exact spot, in drier conditions, without the trickling streamlet.</i>
<img alt="Looking across Pentargon Cove to recording position" src="https://www.broad-horizon-nature.co.uk/170311-190826_overlooking_mouth_of_pentargon_cove_to_beeny_cliff_02.jpg">
<i>Later photo, overlooking the mouth of Pentargon Cove to the recording position (yes, the arrow says it almost all!). The exact spot is just hidden because the exposed platform used is just a little lower than what you can see from here.</i>
<b>Techie stuff:</b>
The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested furry windshields — the inner being a Movo one <b>of rectangular box shape*</b>, and the outer a custom Windcut one —, and it was placed on a full-size Zipshot tripod.
* <i>Note that I <strong>WARN AGAINST</strong> use of windshields that are of any sort of box shape, for I soon found that they were inherently unsuitable for any decent-quality recording. While no doubt non-box-shaped windshields from Movo would be okay, the presence of relatively flat surfaces, edges and corners creates internal narrow resonance peaks in the treble, which give the latter an abrasive and rather 'screamy' quality, no matter who's made the particular windshields.  When I realized why my recordings had developed that nasty treble quality I had to go back through all recordings made with that dratted box-shaped windshield, and use Voxengo CurveEQ to enable me to precisely neutralize two narrow treble peaks and thus enable the recordings to sound wonderfully natural rather than bafflingly stressful.</i>
Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshields and correction for the D100's weakness in very low bass — and then, later on, the aforementioned remedial EQ measure using Voxengo CurveEQ to remove the two narrow treble peaks kindly added by that rogue model of furry windshield.
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