Here is my recording of the 4th of July for 2018. Microphones are inexpensive electret capsules encased in facial tissue. I used phantom power to electret plug-in power adapters from Naiant Studio to connect the electret condenser microphones to balanced XLR inputs.
This is a wide stereo recording. One microphone was placed outside a window facing west in my living room and the other outside a sliding door on the east side of the living room. The metal window frame of the living room window has a wire running from it to my Mackie Blackjack audio interface to reduce hum pick-up. This time there’s no additional audio processing other than hard limiting to -.1db. The input microphone gain was set at about 30db (about halfway on the Blackjack) which is considerably lower than past recordings.