There are two issues when applying MFCC for sound event recognition: 1) sound events have a broader spectral range than speech thus the log-frequency scale is less informative; 2) low frequency noise is more prevalent thus the log-frequency scale captures more noise. To address these issues, we study two alternative frequency scales and show that they outperform MFCCs for sound event recognition under mismatch conditions using Support Vector Machines (SVMs) without the need for complex algorithms.