Werner Althaus

At my work we have a good collection of T-powered as well as P-48 powered 415's, 416's, 435's, 815's and 816s and I have not noticed any significant difference in noise-floor relative to the powering scheme across this selection spanning close to 50 years. Having said that I am not sure I'd call any of them "low noise" when comparing them with newer MKH series microphones. I love these mics for what they do well but on occasion I had to replace them in the field for quieter, higher output variants.

I'd advise against putting anything at the 180 degree spot/ back of the microphone, especially a bucket which is a very non-linear sound collector of sorts, especially when agitated with wind. The common misconception is that directional mics have a null at 180 degrees or various other angles , depending on the polar pattern. In practice microphones, especially shotgun microphones hardly ever have textbook patterns across the entire frequency range. Schoeps is probably the best at achieving as close as possible a textbook pattern but one quick look at the graph of the MiniCmit shows that at lower frequencies you have a significant rear lobe, meaning that this mic hears a lot of what's going on in the lower mids and bass behind the mic . 500 Hz is only down 8 dB and 250 Hz is only down 7 dB from its on-axis response. It is very important to consider what is happening "behind" the mic.

getting clean gain vs noisy gain may reveal some audio signals that would otherwise be buried in the noisefloor but it will not give your microphone more "reach"

Yes, Phantom power used (+48V, 3mA×2 load), the current rating of the Mini CMIT is 2.3mA, so no real issue there although far from a comfortable margin.

yes, driving a long cable with a hotter signal is definitely one good reason, however there might be another one. I'm not an EE and for a long time the idea of stacking micpres has confused me but the explanation that I found recently made some sense to me, so here it goes. Apparently every OP amp's performance is restricted by the "gain bandwidth product" which basically states that for more gain we sacrifice audio bandwidth. If a cheap design is implemented in a prosumer level interface/ mixer then it seems possible that in order to achieve 50 or 60 dB of gain, bandwidth might be sacrificed. This certainly would shed some light on my experience with cheap micpres where the mic only sounds somewhat linear in a very narrow gain range, usually around 20-30 dB. In that case a second fixed gain preamp might yield better results. Maybe someone with more electrical engineering background can shed some light on my "cringe-worthy" attempt of an explanation.

FYI, the store is called "Hieber-Lindberg" and "Instrumente-Noten" refers to Instruments and sheet music. I remember the Lindberg mail-order catalogues from my youth. I assume this is that company.

Thanks for the replies. I did find a few working machines locally.

It's 2024 and I can't revive any of our old DA-88 machines that sat in storage since 2000. Our engineering department no longer works on tape machines so I'm out of luck there. I have some tapes that need digitizing but I can't decide where to send them for digitizing. Any recommendations? Thanks.

I'm still running ProTools 11.3.2 on a RADAR Studio workstation and I can't (and don't want to) upgrade due to the RADAR folks strongly discouraging updating to a higher Windows OS ( It's running a stripped down version of 8.1) Will Hush Pro work with my old ProTools version and windows OS?

Nobody has mentioned the youtube channel "OneMic" yet. There are lot's of videos done with one AEA stereo ribbon mic. This is one of my favorites https://youtu.be/kVf8lifkmF8 Post production is done with clever MS processing, driving a reverb with a bandpassed send of the mid signal only. Full band, wonderfully balanced. https://youtu.be/af8pTJCpljU

I bought two IZ Technologies RADAR Studio workstations from VK, as well as some other stuff, always first rate, very professional. IMO SW is more for buying stuff I can't get at my local store, like guitar pedals, recording interfaces, etc.

I also turn subtitles on for everything I watch and my hearing is still good. Part of it is the speakers facing down or backwards in modern flatscreen TVs. I do not turn dynamic range control on since it only makes the problem worse IMO. A very dynamic mix with a cheesy AGC or some other "dynamic range control" on it sounds worse to my ears than turning the volume up and down. I have a dim/ mute switch on my remote that drops the volume to half, then full mute, dialog is always full volume, action scenes are at half, works like a charm. And on home TVs the dynamic range isn't more extreme, it just seems that way because in general people watch TV at lower levels than movie-goers do it the cinema and lower level dialog quickly disappears into the general domestic noise floor since the overall listening volume is much lower to begin with. Properly understood, better S/N ratios and additional headroom in digital delivery systems are there to do away with sound-degrading artifacts (noise floors, compression and limiting artifacts, etc) when recording and reproducing sounds at various levels, they are not for shifting loudness to more extremes on either end, that's just counterproductive.

I think it's not as simple as that. Certain pre amps play well with certain microphones. With mic inputs we're looking for impedance bridging so a ratio of >10:1 is considered ideal. A Shure SM 57 wants to see at least 1.5KOhm and increasing/ decreasing the input impedance will alter the response. I'm unable to get impedance specs on the Zaxcom but some of the SoundDevices pres have input impedances of up to 4 KOhm brining them closer to certain studio preamps like Millennia or even specific Ribbon micpres that go up to 18KOhm or higher. With most modern mics it doesn't matter but without knowing what mic you base your opinion on it is hard to follow along.

It might help to first understand that Ambisonic B-Format is basically Stereo Mid-Side times 3 ( since it's along 3 axis, left to right, front to back and up to down).and just like MS Stereo it is very compatible with both up and down mixing.Hence my comment that it can be safe. But does it sound good? I think you misunderstood my comment about plug-ins and phase. Someone will have to use either a plug-in or hardware to first convert A-Format to B-Format and then to create the desired channel based configuration for the mic. On our Calrec MK-4 the hardware controller converts A Format to B-Format and it can generate various patterns from Omni to figure 8 in stereo ( No 5.1 with the old hardware controller) and everything in between, as well as rotate the mic along the horizontal and vertical plane. However, the analog circuitry involved creates phase issues and the digital plug ins do a much better job at this math but if pushed to extremes you can still get phase artifacts, at least to my ears. Other problems arise from the correction filters in the plug in not matching the mic's physical distances between the capsules. If you have a specific mic in mind ( the Rode) and use the Rode plug in to generate the channel based output ( 5.1 for example) you'll be fine, if you send raw A-format and the post house uses something else to convert to B-Format and then to channel based audio you might have issues. Remember that A-format is basically useless before conversion to B-Format.

I think it can be "safe" but I don't think it's a particularly good choice. The spatial resolution and soundstage of FOA isn't very good except at close range , the sweetspot is very small. Converting to channel based formats ( mono,stereo,5.1, etc) requires a matching plug-in with the appropriate correction for that particular microphone's set of capsules only being "somewhat coincident", so you'd use the Sennheiser Ambeo plug for the Sennheiser Ambeo mic but that plug-in doesn't do conversion to channelbased audio, it only converts A to B format and steers the mic's 0 axis. It's strictly for 360/ VR. I've used the Harpex for Ambeo and Soundfield mics. The soundfield plugin sounds better with the Soundfield mic, however, for the Ambeo mic the Harpex sounds better than the soundfield/ Rode plug-in. And while somewhat coincident you can certainly create phase issues with the plug-in decoding to channelbased formats. I can't imagine anyone mixing for theatrical release being too thrilled to be handed B-format audio but I could be wrong about that.