Configuration help

[drippinhun]

The college where I work at wants to allow instructors to record their classroom lectures directly into a portable workstation. We attempted using a low-end Shure wireless lavalier transmitted into cassette recorder. Then I would transfer the recording through an Omni, into a Delta 66, and onto Cool Edit Pro. The time it took to clean up the sound was too much and the lav produced too many noises (clothing rubs, instructor turning head from side-to-side, room air conditioning noises, etc.)

Now they (the administrators) want a better setup. We are looking at recording onto a portable tower computer's hard drive from a headworn Sein (mic,trans., receiver, 1/8" jack.) This should prevent many of the noises I mentioned, including the 'talent' that can not be trained. Because other instructors have recorded through cheap desktop mics at their stations in their offices, the bosses feel utilizing the integrated sound card that comes with the Dell computers the college has an obligation to use exclusively, there is no need for a pro sound card. My hands are tied. These audio lectures are to be directly encoded (Windows Media) and later streamed. No time for edits

What I am wondering is your thoughts on this proposed setup. Also, if I must live with this, would you suggest at least adding a program like Cool Edit and using the compression/limiting function to keep the sound in check?
Also, would you recommend using a second hard drive as a scratch
disk, solely for the audio?
Thanks for your advise.

 

[RWhite]

Even the crappy CMedia sound built into a Dell should be fine for recording a spoken-work lecture. You are correct that the main problem is getting the sound into the machine.

I'm hardly a mic expert, so I really can't comment on that. However you might want to consider getting something like a Behringer 602 mixer, which has 2 mic preamps. They sell for about $75 and are extremely portable. Again, not the best quality but more than good enough for your purpose. Then run the main outs into the line-in on your Dell.

I think a seperate hard drive is a very good idea, especially for long uninterrupted recording.