A new dawn for the Collings & Herrin podcast: 157 has been recorded on a Tascam DR-100 portable digital recorder (pictured, tipping its black foam hat), which Richard bought online in the middle of the night while on tour and which came with a free 6’x3′ snooker table. Whether we should have had the new machine switched to UNI or OMNI is still a moot point, but hopefully not a mute point, eh, audiophiles? And we know the file size is too big – it was almost too big to send to Orange Mark, but we frankly time-poor, and had to get on with recording Podcast 159 for two weeks’ hence. (Someone called pkx166h is very cross with us for putting out a large file, as he or she found that it clogged up their iTunes while it downloaded. You can read his/her angry comments here.)
Let us know what you think of our new HD direction, which, this week, is mainly about catching up on the last three weeks – which is the longest we’ve ever been apart since March 2008, before which, of course, we were nearly always apart. So, it’s Richard’s conditioner nightmare, the Zion Baptist protests and Andrew’s Andrew Collins Twitter name tropical storm story, perhaps his finest since Lion Man. At one point, you can hear Andrew blowing his nose and then the rustle of the tissue as he disposes of it. Not sure if you needed to hear that, but audiophiles had better get a tissue ready for it.
collinsandherring 
New sound is excellent, but a bit real!
I listen to the podcast whilst walking the dog, and this morning kept turning around at all the taps and bangs and dropped pens etc! When Collings blew his nose, it scared the sh*t out of me!!
Andy Bates
In response to the person (or should that just be “re: ponce?”) who complained about the size of the new podcast, nobody is arguing that a filesize of 125 Mb is a bit much for 68 minutes of speech. However, it isn’t as if the file weighs more and you have to physically carry it to your home! It just means a slightly longer download time. For what is, lest ye forget, free entertainment.
For the record, the only thing that needs to be done is to reduce the recording bitrate setting on the device from 256 kbps down to the usual 128 kbps. Or, you could just re-encode the finished file to the lesser bitrate, which I tried purely as a timing experiment, and which only took around 4 minutes.
In regards to this entry’s tags, I’m just glad that, although you got close, “Toss Cam” wasn’t used. Now there’s a DVD extra only the most ardent – or perverted – of fans would ever want to see!
great podcast guys, you have hit a real purple patch just lately.i was wondering if the highlights reel andrew made for the sony awards is going to be posted or maybe appear as an dvd extra?
It’s not a highlights reel. It’s Podcast 109 with some of the boring bits taken out, and it fades out and back in again at those points. Then I discovered you can’t even do that for a Sony entry, so I was forced to set aside my deft editing work and just send in an hour of the podcast, and fade it out at the end. Most unsatisfactory. I knew we wouldn’t get a nomination though.