Been noticing this myself lately, though I'm coming at it more from a cryptid/Mothman angle than straight EVP work. Started dabbling with a Zoom H5 recorder after someone on here recommended it, and yeah - there's definitely something happening in the audio right before anything interesting shows up.
My issue is I can't work out if what I'm capturing is genuine interference or just the recorder picking up electromagnetic noise from my own equipment. Running it near an old CRT monitor doesn't exactly help, I suppose.
What I want to know is whether anyone's actually measured the static bursts properly rather than just going ". Ooh that sounds spooky." Has anyone run their recordings through something like Audacity and looked at the actual waveform data? Because there's a difference between random noise and a consistent pattern appearing pre-phenomenon, and nobody seems to want to have that conversation properly.
Also - does the type of recorder matter? Genuinely asking. I've seen people swear by everything from professional field recorders down to their bloody phone. Surely the hardware affects what you're capturing?
Not dismissing the spirit angle entirely, just think we'd have a stronger case if someone could show consistent, repeatable results rather than anecdotal ". It happened to me once."
Anyone actually done rigorous comparisons, or is this forum just going to be ghost stories again?