[Ty Ford]

Hello Eoin and welcome to the Cow Audio Forum.

I’m sorry for your pain. Try a declicker filter. It’s typically used to remove clicks from old records, but the noise sounds very similar.

As to the cause; thats more difficult. If you are ABSOLUTELY sure that you listened fully before he got up to speak and that everything was really OK, then, unless the lights changed, it wouldn’t be lights.

you said: Very quickly, between the first and second speech, I creeped up behind the head table, and turned off my mic that was attached to the hotel’s mic and attached a wireless lapel mic, on the same frequency, to the Groom and then onto the Best Man for his speech.

Nothing changed. (I popped a Zoom H2 on a mic stand in front of each speaker aswell, which picked up the sound okay from there.)

When you say nothing changed, do you mean the noise persisted or that with no other apparent changes, the noise went away?

Regards,

Ty Ford

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[Ty Ford]

Hello Din, and welcome to the Cow Audio Forum.

Try these if you want to suspend them from above.

https://www.audio-technica.com/cms/wired_mics/1e904e3760bfdde3/index.html/
https://www.pssl.com/!kHeXBrEVm3Z7Bep2qatRFA!/Choir-Mics

On stands, you can use pretty much any good cardioid. The most amazing bargain I’ve seen is for the MCA SP-1. https://www.pssl.com/Search?q=SP-1&x=0&y=0&by=s

Three rows and 40 people. You’d need 3 maybe 4 mics. These mics are about the size of a standard flashlight. You’d need good sturdy stands that could reach high enough, depending on the specifics.

Regards,

Ty Ford

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[Ty Ford]

Gunther,

I would use a camera mic on one camera and a board feed to the other then find the right balance of each during post production.

Regards,

Ty Ford

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[Ty Ford]

Hello Gunther and welcome to the Cow Audio Forum.

Getting a good recording of an entire band with one mic takes a lot of luck and a great deal of intelligence. You don’t tell us what the recording will be used for. Please give us more details.

Regards,

Ty Ford

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[Ty Ford]

Hello Tom and welcome to the Cow Audio Forum.

The good news is that impedance matching is not the problem. Most pro mics are around 50 Ohms to 200 Ohms. Input impedances on preamps are anywhere from 1 kOhm and up. 6 k , even 18 k are not unusual.

The bad news is that you seem to have bought a very inexpensive mic and an inexpensive recorder that does not have a mic preamp. All mics need preamps. The +mic version seems to have an onboard mic, but the info does not mention a mic preamp, only an instrument input. Plug a guitar or keyboard into it and see how that does.

https://line6.com/store/hardware.html?familyID=53

In attempting to save money, you burned yourself. In the pro audio world we have a saying, “I can’t afford to buy cheap.”

Perhaps if you could tell us exactly what you want to do with the gear we could help you better.

Regards,

Ty Ford

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[Ty Ford]

Hello Robin,

Well in many of today’s cameras, the line level input is just a resistor network in front of the mic level inputs.

But yes, in theory, the mixer preamps will be of better quality and they will improve the audio quality, especially if you can bypass the camera preamps.

Regards,

Ty Ford

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[Ty Ford]

Robin,

Merry Xmas morning.

Usually a preamp amplifies the level of a mic to line level.

Regards,

Ty Ford

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[Ty Ford]

Peter,

What a wonderful roundup! Thanks so much for posting this.

Was that a -10 for US TV? Just brick wall limited so the meter hits -10 and stays there?

I know Discovery has some pretty strict (and squished) audio requirements. I don’t remember exactly, something like -14 to -18 for everything. They have an audio analyzer. If you submit and they find it out of spec, they kick it back to you.

Regards,

Ty Ford

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[Ty Ford]

Hello Robin and welcome to the Cow Audio Forum.

A few points for clarification. There’s the input sensitivity of the transmitter, the output level of the receiver and the input level of the camera. All three need to be set right to get the best results.

The transmitter input sensitivity ONLY has to do with the mic sensitivity and how loud the sound source is. Read the directions for your transmitter so that you get a high enough reading on the TRANSMITTER. You want to make that as high as possible without clipping.

The output of the RECEIVER is frequently adjustable; sometimes from mic level to line level. You give us no specifics, so helping you is difficult.

You said setting the camera to line level made the incoming audio too weak. That probably means your receiver has a mic level output. If that’s the case. Keep your camera input set to mic level input and readjust the receiver output.

The traditional wisdom is to run the previous stage (the receiver in this case) with a healthy level so you don’t have to crank up the inputs on the camera to the fullest extreme. In general, operating any audio gain stage at its maximum results in more circuit noise.

Regards,

Ty Ford

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[Ty Ford]

Hello Seth and welcome to the Cow Audio Forum.

I think it depends on where you hang your hat. If you’re in a town where unions are big, you probably can’t do a lot of different things. Having said that, I’m sure the indie scene is flying under the union radars in NY, LA and Chicago.

I like the diversified approach; as long as you can really do the job. You’re only as good as your last job and if you represent yourself as being able to do something and can’t, word gets around.

I evolved into music mastering and location audio. I’ve been doing each for more than ten years now and a good portion of my business comes form both.

You can try small projects and work your way up. I’m doing exactly that with my lighting, shooting and editing. I’ve been doing low risk projects that allow me to get my chops up. So far, so good!

Season’s Best

Ty Ford

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