I have always been keen to reduce bulk- especially with the advent of the digital age. I put in my years lugging around Nagras with many 7 ½ inch reels of tape, batteries, and accessories. I usually planned, for a month or two of travel, my outfit would include 50 pounds just in recording equipment.

Pictured is the Sennheiser 421 I carried back then — the same microphone that we are still using today! It weighs 13.6 ounces. It costs about $200 dollars and of course needs the digital MixPre6 to actually digitize the recording.

Meet the Zoom H1N (pictured on my baseball hat). This digital stereo recorder weighs 2.4 ounces. That includes the batteries and the micro card memory of 32 gigabits — easily enough to record a complete New Testament. It costs about $100.

This is the Zoom recording of Luke 2:10…

Outwardly these two microphones look similar but don’t forget that the Zoom H1N is a recorder. You don’t need microphone cables. You have everything needed to record in those 2.4 ounces — and with a quality that is professional.

In the photo of Demetre (who is recording the new language of Zapoteco de Juquila Vijanos) you can see both the old and the new technology at work. We began by giving Demetre a baseball hat with the mission name and “5fish” on it and then clamped the Zoom H1N to it – no tripod – nothing. Demetre was left with the new baseball hat that will be a reminder of where to find his recording when it is published on 5fish.

You can see that he is closely following his outline on his cell phone, on which we had planned the program. He is referencing a related Zapoteco New Testament and is translating on the go. The actual act of recording this language barely took an hour because the planning and preparation were all prepared digitally. Someday we will probably be able to do the recordings remotely without the ten hours of winding roads that took us to Demetre’s mountain and back.

We can thank God for the technology that makes all this possible. We are living in an age where the physical reality of the Glory of God covering the world as the waters cover the sea is very literal.