[Wylug-discuss] Seeking Advice: Quality Mobile Sound Recording

[Phil Driscoll]

I'd like to put in a word against the SM58 - the emperor's new microphone if 
ever there was one. The upside is that they are rugged. The downsides are 
that they sound awful and cost more than you need to pay.

The Red Audio RVD30 Dynamic Microphone
http://www.red5audio.com/acatalog/Dynamic_Microphones.html
beats the pants off an SM58 to my ears, is similarly rugged (though 
unfortunately has an on-off switch) and costs £36.

This type of dynamic mic (RVD30, SM58 and similar) is best suited to close up 
work placed right next to a mouth or a musical instrument. As with all 
cardioid microphones, the closer they are positioned to the sound source, 
the 'bassier' they will sound - and as they are designed for close up work, 
their frequency response is tailored to compensate. Hence, in an interview 
type situation where the mic may need to be a foot or more away from the 
speaker, they will tend to sound too 'thin'. However in an environment where 
there's a lot of background noise or a PA, then a mic which works close up is 
an advantage.

For capturing all the nuances of acoustic instruments you really need a 
condensor (or a back-electret) microphone. It used to be the case that good 
ones cost a fortune (the best sounding mics I've ever used were Bruel & Kjaer 
omnidirectional condensers costing over £2000 each), but these days there 
seem to be a lot of low cost units on the market that will be more than good 
enough for your purposes. I have a pair of Rode NT1000 large diaphragm 
condensor mics
http://www.rodemic.com/?pagename=Products&product=NT1000
which are about £150 and sound fantastic in a wide range of applications (note 
that you will need phantom power to use them).

In terms of getting the audio into your computer, and particularly as you are 
just experimenting at the moment, you could do much worse than buy the 
Behringer UCA202 for £18
http://www.dolphinmusic.co.uk/page/shop/flypage/product_id/8522
This is a little box on the end of a USB cable which gives you stereo in and 
out of your computer (as well as an optical S/PDIF connection). I plugged one 
into my Thinkpad running SuSE 10.0 and it just worked - no config to do, it 
just appeared as a sound card to Audacity. Sound quality is certainly good 
enough for anything you are going to convert to ogg or mp3, but it's not 
great for multitrack work because of latency.

I think you should always record to WAV (or similar raw uncompressed data). 
There's no point risking your computer missing something or glitching because 
its working too hard on encoding whilst recording. Hard disk space is cheap 
and you can encode to whatever you need later on without the unpleasantness 
associated with encoding one lossy format from data stored in a different 
lossy format.

You'll need something to amplify the microphone output to line level and 
provide phantom power to any condensor microphones. Mackie mixers are highly 
regarded for sound quality, and Behringer mixers give an extraordinary amount 
of bang for your buck. Whichever way you go, you'll need balanced mic inputs 
and you should use starquad microphone cables so that you are never plagued 
with unwanted induced signals.
http://www.canford.co.uk/commerce/item_38-340_2001226.aspx

-- 
Phil Driscoll