Knowledge Base

Prepare data acquisition

Prepare Data Acquisition

Microphone Settings

1. Make sure that the microphones you want to use are connected. If you work with a laptop, ensure that the microphones are powered through the USB hub (see page 3).
2. Position the microphones at 20-30 cm from the sound source. For tips about how to elicit vocalizations in rodents, see the UltraVox XT Help.
3. For each microphone in the Experiment Settings (see page 6):

• Click the Settings button.
• In the Microphone Settings window, click the Start monitoring button.
• Wait that the animals produce vocalizations. Check the waveform plot and the spectrogram.
• Adjust the Gain until the waveforms of the vocalizations are well visible, but only rarely enter the upper and lower areas highlighted in red. This prevents that the signal is clipped during the actual tests, resulting in distortion of acoustic frequencies.
• Try to keep the gain as low as possible. Remember that gain also increases the amplitude of the background noise picked by the microphone, not only the amplitude of the actual signal. Prepare data acquisition

Control The Start/stop Of Data Acquisition

You can start and stop acquisition manually, or automatically using an external triggering software. 1. Choose Setup > Trial Control Settings. 2. Choose one of the options available under Start acquisition and Stop acquisition.

Note

Choose External program trigger to start and stop acquisition from

another program, like EthoVision XT, or The Observer XT. For details, see Control UltraVox XT from other software in the UltraVox XT Help.

Source: UltraVox XT 4 - Quick Start Guide