1 min bells coming in at varying times
Recorded from the roof of the Hotel Intercontinental, a few hundred yards from Amsterdam’s Centraal Station
I asked for a cheap dive close to the centre as I wanted to record a repeat of a concert from the late 1970’s which was repeated on DAB I requested a room high up, and installed a DAB tuner with a wire aerial slung out the window. Loads of signal strength, as to expected in the middle of the capital city. The concert was recorded digitally with HiMD and from the analogue output using my old MDLP as backup. The HiMD failed. Moral of the story is don’t edit your HiMDs on the deck if you want to be sure… Anyway, the backup was good.
After the concert, I stoked up with a few beers, and in the morning heard the city come alive to the sound of the bells. The first one started a good five minutes before everyone else, though the 1 minute format lops most of the overzealousness off. It’s a rotten recording, hissy as hell, even though the sound was loud enough to be easily heard through the window.
Why is there a hook sticking out of the roof, you may ask? It puzzled me too, but all was explained when I took a canal boat tour later on that day.
recorded from Sony ECM907 at 44.1kHz HiSP. High-pass filtered from 220Hz at 12dB/octave to reduce traffic noise.
recorded 19 Aug 2005