Bruce Watson
Forum Replies Created
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Better example. That sounds like RF, and digital to me. Might be a cell phone talking to a tower. No doubt you’ve turned off (airplane mode) the cell phones and pagers, etc. as much as possible. What Sennheiser blocks are you using? In an “RF hell” like Manhattan or downtown LA, or someplace with less RF? Doesn’t really sound like broadcast interference.
Mr. Crowley can probably nail this. I’m such an amateur troubleshooter by comparison.
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[Jacob Dean] “Also, this is definitely not noise associated with phantom power – I’ve experimented with both +48 volts active and passive.”
You do know that these are battery powered units that should not be fed phantom power at all, right? Turn your phantom power completely off for any channel being fed by a Sennheiser EK 100 receiver.
As to buzzing, I don’t actually hear any in your sample. Oh, wait. I went back and cranked the volume way up. There are a couple of tiny short duration wide bandwidth “sparks” at very low levels. Could be a number of things, from a mic cable problem to some level of RF interference to maybe a static discharge (unlikely). I don’t hear anything else untoward — I’m not hearing any kind of hum or any kind of phasing issues (unless the fade up / fade downs in the clip are the doing of some unknown poltergeist).
If all your recording gear records whatever problems you’re experiencing, then the problem more or less has to be upstream from the recording gear. That is, the G3s and the cable that connects them to the recorders. The most common things that cause problems are the mic cables, the connectors where they plug into the units, and the most notorious is the batteries used to power the units. Wireless systems are well known to not like rechargeable batteries. They respond much better to very fresh alkalines. If you have to use rechargeables, the only brand I know of that people don’t constantly complain about are the Panny eneloops (and even then you have to use an excellent charger).
Personally I’ve been using Sennheiser G3s for a number of years. I’ve never had anything but good results. I did have problems once from a Sennheiser “G0” set that got swamped by a cell phone or cell phone tower once. But nothing like that from my own or anyone elses G3s. Highly reliable for me.
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[Mark DAgostino] “Creative Media Productions – Exelon
Baltimore, MD”You’re in Baltimore? You’re in serious luck. Talk to Ty Ford. His acoustic and broadcast background is just what you seem to need. And he’s local to you.
Edit: Ah, I see Ty has posted. Good enough, I’ll get out of the way now. 😉
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[Justin Brewer] “I was hoping someone out there would be able to give me some guidance as to how they could have pulled this off!”
I think they have: https://smallsessions.com/about.html
That picture shows two handheld cameras and a boomop/mixer for sound. That’s what I was thinking when I watched the vid, because it doesn’t sound like stereo in my headphones. And that’s OK really, the guy and his guitar are pretty much a mono source.
That church is highly reflective; that’s natural reverb you’re hearing, not post processing. In fact, it doesn’t sound like they did much post processing at all — the singer manages to overload the hall in spots, and they don’t bother to correct that much if at all.
As to microphones, I’m betting it’s probably just a hyper. I say that because his voice is in the sweet spot, but the guitar is a little out of pattern. What I’d expect from a hyper held a couple of meters back, and half+ a meter as shown in the picture. They might could have done a bit better with a cardioid, say a Sennheiser 8040?
There are some good solid reasons to do something like this in mono, especially vids you expect to play back on mono players like phones/tablets. You get mono compatibility by definition, you simplify the post processing, and you really simplify capture — you can do it with a boom pole, like you would dialog, like these guys apparently do.
But… stereo sounds better for music. You could, for example, mount a mid-side (MS) stereo pair (for example, a Sennheiser MKH 30 (figure 8 “side” mic) and an MKH 40 or 8040 (cardioid “mid” mic)) on a boom stand. You get flexibility on the mid mic which can be anything from another figure 8, through cardioid, all the way to omni (which would probably work rather well in that church). MS is coincident, so you automatically get good mono compatibility. You can modify MS in post to change the size of the sound stage which you really can’t do well with any other stereo technique. And since it’s coincident, you can get both mics in a windbasket (Rycote makes some for exactly this purpose) for those exterior shoots. You could even use a boom op and hand hold MS, but I wouldn’t; most listeners strongly object to a moving stereo image. So you should really use a mic stand (boom stand) if you’re going to do any stereo work.
There are lots of ways to create a stereo image, MS is just one way. Read up if that’s what you want.
And a warning. Good audio is going to take at least as much effort on your part as good video (newbies never believe this, and you probably won’t either, but you’ll learn over time). People viewing your vids will forgive all kinds of video sins, but they will not forgive bad audio. Bad audio will have them heading somewhere else in seconds. Watch your stats, they will tell the tale.
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[Richard Crowley] “You may need to use an EXTERNAL audio interface…”
Yup. This solved a problem I had years ago. Had noise from my graphics card inside the case effecting the output of the audio card, also inside the case. Switched to an external headphone amp fed by USB, problem solved.
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[Troy Grady] “We did another shoot over the weekend where the receivers were plugged into six-foot XLR cables and located away from the recorder, and away from each other, and that seemed to work. Not sure how reliable that’s going to be though.”
Interesting how that works. It’s almost like magnetic interference. Whatever it is, you’re not the first to experience it, nor to find out that spacing the transmitter and receiver away from each other is “the cure” for it. I’m thinking Sennheiser has some work to do on the AVX line. But it’s new, and all new stuff gets refined after the engineers see what really happens in the field.
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[Troy Grady] “And the AVX units plug right into it with no additional cables, and no analog interference in the signal – they’re digital over the air.”
RFI is RFI, it doesn’t care if your signal is analog or digital. There’s nothing magical about digital encoding that will save it from RFI. You can increase the ability to recognize and correct missing or deformed bits in the packet, but if your ECC code has to get bigger than the the data it’s trying to protect, where do you stop? For example, computer data on DAT tapes used to be able to find and correct errors 17 consecutive bits wide — the ECC bits well outnumbered the data bits to do it though (1024 ECC bits for every 768 data bits IIRC). Not exactly efficient, that. I’m just sayin’ that “digital reliability” has its cost.
As to your noise problem, try increasing the separation between the transmitter and the receiver. See what that does to the noise. No, I’m not kidding.
The problems you are having with radio mics are why I always say that wireless is a last resort. Not a first, but a last resort. If I can use a cable, I always use a cable. For sit down interviews I *always* use a balanced XLR cable. It sounds better, it’s way more reliable, it’s way cheaper, no latency issues, etc.
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[Neil Christian] “and just use my old Marantz brick as a recorder as it has a digital in.”
A participant over at Taperssection is, or was, doing exactly what you propose:
https://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=174429.0;topicseen
I only post the URL to the thread over at Taperssection because the body of the thread contains hints about how/where to obtain an AES3 -> S/PDIF cable that is known to work between the MixPre-D and the Marantz 661.
That said, I’ve never done this myself. But I’m thinking about it now… 😉
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Well, you can do this I suppose. The MixPre-D can output AES3, while the PMD661 accepts S/PDIF. These aren’t the same electrically, but the bit streams reportedly are the same. There’s an old Gearslutz thread about this:
Personally, I’d love a fully digital recorder that I could use as a bit-bucket without having to buy all the analog circuits and controls that I wouldn’t use. But… if that’s on the market, I’ve never seen it. Why won’t somebody make a dumb old digital only recorder? IDK.
I’ve got a MixPre-D, but I’ve never used the AES3 capability because of this lack of a bit-bucket. I just go line-out to the recorder and let the recorder do the ADC. Not fighting the intended use of these devices has its own advantages — they are known to work well this way. ?
That said, picking between the MixPre and the MixPre-D on the used market, I would still opt for the MixPre-D. Not because it sounds better (it might, IDK) but because it’s more flexible and easier to use (easier to set up the limiters, better meters, has an additional unbalanced mic level output ideal for feeding camcorders, etc.).