One of the fastest growing commercial and entertainment centers in the country, Orlando, Fla., has also become something of media mecca, and, as such, it has become home to a number of large and small recording studios and audio and video production companies that cater to both regional and national clients. Miami is still the much larger market in every respect, but Orlando has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years and has sustained healthy growth for much of the past decade.

Richard King, who won an Oscar two year ago for his sound work on Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World, says that location sound effects recordists John Fasal and Eric Potter are "absolutely the best at what they do. They're both really technically savvy and informed and also creative and clever about getting the sounds that are described to them. Both together and independently, they can always figure out how to accomplish it."

The duo's credit list—collectively and separately—includes such films as Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, Signs, Training Day, Unbreakable, The Jackal, Independence Day, The Hunt for Red October, Top Gun, The Fugitive, Crimson Tide, The Fifth Element, The Thin Red Line, Pearl Harbor, all three Matrix films, Men In Black, Speed, Twister, Ronin, The Green Mile, Ocean's Eleven, The Time Machine, Spider-Man, and The Manchurian Candidate.

I caught up with them while they were busy recording sounds for the Spielberg remake of War of the Worlds, which opens next week nationwide. They had just finished a round of recordings for that film that took them several times to the East Coast, where they went on location to capture sounds of an army convoy rolling through a countryside, had extras from the film running and screaming through the streets of a small town in upstate New York, went to a working shipyard to gather sounds of a container cargo port, and even spent a day in a bar getting that ambience on tape for a scene. Then it was back to their home base in the Los Angeles area and more work: dropping cars from forklifts to get some crunches and crashes appropriate for the alien-induced mayhem in the film; a trip to a desert air base to record planes; and even a session in a swimming pool to record some underwater metal groans for a key scene involving an overturned ferry. For the latter, the sounds were pumped through speakers floated on small platforms on the pool and then re-recorded using underwater mics.

With so many years in the business, Potter and Fasal have been through a number of different recording media, beginning, not surprisingly, with Nagra recorders. When DAT recorders became reliable enough to use, they employed them on occasion. However, Potter says, "We found that we missed the quality of the mic pre-amps of the Nagra when we recorded to DAT, as well as the tape compression—especially when recording race cars or sports cars, big American V-8 engines, jet aircraft; things with a lot of dynamic range and a lot of punch. Those were still best captured on the Nagra.

"By the early- to mid-'90s, though, we started to see the introduction of portable 2-channel mic pre-amps from guys like Andy Cooper that made interfacing with DAT a lot more palatable, and that's when I started being able to make a DAT recording more satisfactorily. At the same time, people on the receiving end, the editors, were much happier to receive things on a DAT than on a 1/4in. reel, what with the program numbers making it easier to find things and the loading [being] easier. By 2000 it was a real burden for me to lay a 1/4in. reel on someone, even though it made a superior recording in a lot of ways. The only time I bring out the Nagra these days are for some explosions and gunshots. The strength of the tape compression and the exciting distortion—it's another flavor that I like."

In 1998, Fasal and Potter started using the Zaxcom Deva 4-track digital hard disk for their location sound effects recording—that is what they used on Master & Commander, for example. Potter explains the advantage of having multiple tracks to work with: "Let's say we're working with a 4-channel recorder. If you want to use a microphone up front, say on channels 1 and 2 as the main shot, we'll select a microphone that really brings out what's needed. If you need the lower-mid thrust of a tank firing, you might choose a Neumann 190 or 191 up front and then put a stereo pair of Schoeps facing rearward toward the mountain range to capture the reflection and decay and the nice high-end detail that comes from that. Sometimes the opposite might work in another situation, where you want that high-end detail to be up front. It's a matter of making your main stereo shot using a microphone that accommodates the character of that sound."

On Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, they used an 8-channel HHB Porta Drive. Though the higher bit rate capability and additional tracks gave it certain advantages, Potter says, "I didn't think it was as well suited to sound effects recording [as the Deva]. There's a lot of setup involved and a lot of options that would be good for a production mixer but which are a little too cumbersome for us to use in a down-and-dirty kind of way. We also had some channels develop some residual hard drive noise—like the sound of the hard drive spinning would actually leak into the analog electronics somewhere."

"In December [2004]," Potter adds, "I took delivery on a Sound Devices 744t, and it's been a very handy machine. It's a very small—possibly too small—4-channel recorder in the same vein as the old Deva II, but spec'd out for us modern Mac users. It's got a FireWire output for getting the files out. It's easy—I can hook it up to my Powerbook at the end of the day and pull the sounds off onto the Mac, and the sessions will go right into Pro Tools as broadcast .wav files in Mac format. It's also a very good-sounding machine. It records all four channels at 192 if you want, and it runs a very long time on a not-so-expensive battery. I have this little Sony camcorder-style battery that I snap into the back of the unit and it'll go all day long."

Fasal adds, "I always tend to bring too much equipment [out in the field]. I always have enough inline pads, patch cables, or mic stand adapters for everyone, and sometimes I'll pull out some oddball mics. I can pretty much kluge something together in any situation. I use my [Sound Devices] 442 mixer mostly, but I sometimes bring my Cooper 104 4-channel [mixer] as well. They have different sounds. I still drag out the DAT machines as a backup to the 744T. Eric and I have used basically everything that you can take out and power with a battery, or a car battery, and each one has its strong points."

They also use a wide variety of microphones, ranging from the ever-popular Schoeps CMC 3s and 4s to Radio Shack PZMs to a slew of mics usually associated with recording studio, rather than location, applications: various Neumanns, Shure SM57s, Audio Technica 4050s and 4033s, and others.

"I blew up an [AKG] 414 on a gun shoot once," Fasal says. "It was one of the dumber things I ever did. I also baked a pair of SM57s that someone suggested I put right under the barrel of a cannon. "I think of mics like brushes," he adds. "They're all good for different things and certain combinations of mics and recorders are magical, like the Schoeps-Nagra combo. That worked for so many things."

Fasal and Potter have actually talked about putting out their own sound effects library somewhere up the road; certainly they have a wealth of material to choose from, but with no let-up of jobs in sight, it might be a while before they can sit back and take stock of the remarkable work they've done over the past two-plus decades.