Listening on monitors or good quality phones will allow you to hear the deep tone created when I smacked my palm against the side of the rigid front fork from my Surly 1×1 single speed mountain bike. I captured this sound with my PCM-D50 using the built in mics. This was a quiet sound so I needed to record in a quiet space.
This time I used my bedroom. The first step was to turn down the heat and wait for the fan to stop on the forced air heating system. Secondly I put the recorder on a stable surface (i.e. the bedside table) held the fork with my left hand while smacking it with my right palm.
Surly 1×1 Rigid Front Fork
During a recent family dinner at my brother’s house I was innocently admiring the ornaments in his home when came across a collection of musical snow globes. I could not resist winding up these devices for some concurrent chaotic music box sound. Fortunately I had my PCM-D50 on hand, so while no one was looking I gathered the snow globes and tried to find a quiet place in the house to make a recording. With the family event fully underway, this was not an easy proposition, but after wandering around for a few minutes I settled on recording them in the bathroom. Despite an odd look from my brother’s wife as I exited the bathroom the recording went well. 
I made a recording of this piercing high powered hand dryer in the bathroom at a local pub. My friend Joe helped by going through the hand drying motions as I held the PCM-D50 recorder to capture this beautifully obnoxious high frequency noise.
I recorded this freight train during a winter bike ride with a group of friends recently. We rode through deep snow, on frozen lakes, head first into snowbanks and all over the place. 
Tonight I’ve decided to share another of my first few Sony PCM-D50 test recordings. It is simply the sound of filling my bathroom sink partway with cold and then the rest of the way with hot water followed by the much quieter sound of the water draining down the plug hole. These sorts of mundane sounds are especially interesting to me once they have been recorded and taken out their context. Do we ever really listen to the sounds things make while we go about our daily lives? Probably not. And for good reason. If we were distracted by the qualities of the typical sounds in our environments we would never survive as a species. Our hearing is tuned to alert us when we hear irregular or unusual sounds. To my ears, ordinary sounds become extraordinary when I focus on listening to them.