Yeah this happens to me pretty regularly actually. Running a Zoom H5 recorder and I get these short crackle bursts maybe 30-60 seconds before anything ". Proper". Starts - almost like the equipment is warming up to something? Sounds daft written down but it's consistent enough that I've started treating it as a heads-up to pay attention.
Tried ruling out the obvious stuff first - interference from my phone, dodgy cables, even the boiler kicking in. Swapped cables twice and moved the recorder away from anything electrical. Still get it.
The skeptic in me says it's just RF interference or temperature/humidity affecting the diaphragm. Hampshire gets properly damp and old buildings do weird things to kit. But the timing is what gets me. It's not random throughout a session, it clusters right at the start.
Has anyone cross-referenced this with EMF spikes? I've been meaning to run my K2 alongside the recorder to see if they correlate. That would at least tell us whether it's a shared environmental thing or something specific to audio equipment.
Curious whether this happens with digital recorders exclusively or if anyone using old analogue tape gear sees the same pattern - that might help narrow down if it's genuinely environmental or a quirk of digital components.
What recorders are people running when this happens?
