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Small mic pre-amp
My questions are regarding choosing a pre-amp for a shotgun mic:
I just got an Edirol R-09HR small digital recorder. It has 1/8″ mic and line inputs. I’m getting an AT 835b shotgun mic. I want to record sound effects, ambient, nature, etc.
The consensus seems to be that a pre-amp will help the audio quality a lot, though I’m not sure if that’s just with hiss-levels or does it go beyond that?
In any event, it needs to be small and light to fit my low-profile on-the-belt style.
The ones that grabbed my attention are the FEL 3.5 MX:
https://www.micbooster.com/products/fel3.5series.html
..this one apparently uses the plug-in-power from the recorder to power it, so it would still go thru the recorder pre-amp circuit, but provide 20db of boost.
And the Maycom MicTube:
https://www.maycom.nl/RK.html
…this one goes into the line in so I guess would be better.
Any thoughts about these products?I’m fairly new to audio stuff but have been reading up a bit.
Thanks for your input,
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John -
3 Replies
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Hello John and welcome to the Cow Audio Forum.
I haven’t seen these preamps before. I have seen the recorder. You’ll need a special cable from the preamp to the recorder to bridge the mono audio from the preamp to both channels of the recorder. The two preamps you show may be wired this way, or not.
Does the recorder offer power to run the preamps?
I’d say get the mic, special cable and recorder first and see how you like it. If you have problems try adding a preamp.
Regards,
Ty Ford
Want better production audio?: Ty Ford’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Watch Ty play guitar -
Thanks for that…
I got my new mic. I bought a $10 XLR to 1/8 mini cable. It is 5′ long, has small guage cable all the way. With the recorder input maxed out, I don’t get much sensitivity with my mic.
I then tried my standard XLR cable, into an XLR to 1/4″ adaptor, into a 1/4″ to 1/8″ adaptor, and into the recorder. Boom – the sensitivity is waaay up. But then I have a lot of noise, I imagine, from all that adaptor stuff.
This makes me wonder if my $10 cable is just crap, or if there’s a different style that would work.
The bottom line is I don’t want to spend another $200 for a preamp if I can get a decent signal from the right cable.
Any ideas, places to point me?
Thanks again,
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John -
Hello John,
As I said before, a regular cable WON’T WORK.
You need on that’s wired to feed your mono mic to a stereo input.as you have learned recently, adapters are noisy.
Regards,
Ty Ford
Want better production audio?: Ty Ford’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Watch Ty play guitar
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