For the last several years, I have been involved with sound reinforcement and recording at my church. I have upgraded the PA system and we’re in the midst of final editing/mastering for an upcoming Christmas CD.
In the process of doing this work, I have learned a few things which might be of assistance. This is the first post in the blog in the live sound and recording category. Many of the posts relating to microphones will also be tagged in the oral history category.
One of the challenges for good sound reinforcement or speech recording is keeping the speaker “on mic”. There are many ways of handling this, but some work better than others. Here are my favourites:
- If the room is quiet and you can do a proper setup, a pair of Sennheiser MKH-416 short shotgun mics, one for the interviewer and one for the interviewee, gives very natural and unselfconscious results.
- For larger groups, I’ve had good results with an Audio Technica AT-822 (or the phantom-powered AT-825) stereo microphone, but the actual voice quality of that mic is inferior to the MKH-416. The high-end is harsher, but, used at a greater distance that is often not as noticeable. The room needs to be very quiet for this to work well, however. This is currently my least favourite approach (of those listed).
- So far, some of the best pickup I have found is a headworn mic–the main subject of this post.
At our church, they had tried headworn mics from Shure and they really were uncomfortable. Whoever selected the units, selected dynamic units and they did not sound all that good. They were retired in favour of the Countryman E6 units (also available from Shure, although I prefer the direct-from-Countryman version with the 2mm cable for robustness).
The Countryman units were working reasonably well, but never seemed to stay in the same place. It was frustrating as it was causing a widely varying sound quality, so we decided to try a DPA 4066 headworn mic on our head priest. The results were outstanding. The unit is comfortable (no more sore ears), it stays put, and it sounds better!
It is no surprise that these are taking over the religious and theatre markets. I am not sure I’d want to try to fit one of these on 87-year-old Aunt Tilly who is trying to tell us some family histories as it may make her self conscious, but probably no more so than a large microphone stuck close to her face. That’s where the short shotgun Sennheiser MKH 416s come in handy, they get the same sound pulled farther back–as long as Aunt Tilly talks in that direction.
As mentioned in a recent post about Story Corps, it appears they are using the Neumann KMS-105 in their mobile recording units. These are reputedly also excellent microphones and would be worthy of consideration when a more conventional, close-talking microphone is required.
A clip-on lavaliere microphone (such as the DPA 4060 miniature microphone, essentially the same capsule as on the 4066 headworn microphone) is useful, but the positioning is critical and often the sound is not as good as one would hope due to body resonances and clothing absorption and rustling.