chrismedr

you must work on weird sets seems to me that you have a pretty clear idea of what you're looking for. sennheiser, schoeps, DPA are all excellent choices, so just go with whatever makes you happy (important aspect in life)

If you plan to spend that kind of money, why not rent the mics and do some tests? as mentioned by others, a lot will come down to personal taste, but also the rest of your setup. For example when I tested some mics on a SD 633, the KM185 had a lot more noise then the MKH50 - somebody with a lot more experience then me told me that on high-end studio preamps it‘s a rather quiet mic. That said, for very quiet sounds, the MKH series seem hard to beat.

Unless I‘m remembering incorrectly, the new mixpre II series uses multistage preamps and therefore features „true“ floating point recording. They state 142dB dynamic range, so even if you take away 10dB for marketing that should easily cover any common situation. check out the tests on the web where people recorded the same sound once with extremely high (clipping) gain and once extremely low and found there‘s virtually no difference after normalizing.

maybe get a nicer boom pole? as for the G3, as you say they are not exactly bad, but anything that is a serious upgrade is going to be quite a bit more expensive. maybe the new Deity will be an option - we'll know as soon as they are out.

probably bad timing with the week-end coming up, but that's definitely one of the cases where I'd want to contact the manufacturer support.

I don't see how anybody can expect *any* mic to be a schoeps "killer"- I mean, how much better did you expect? but the top of the line mics all sound very nice and a lot is down to intended use, environment, voice and taste. I also don't quite understand how the 8050 can be described as "mud" or "no presence", it's one of the punchier sounding mics in my experience. Personally I find it problematic because of handling noise (which is why I prefer the MKH50), but lack of presence was never an issue.

Without knowing any details about what kind of shoot and what kind of equipment (camera and sound) *will* be there on time it’s rather hard to give any meaningful advice...

20ms is half a frame at 24/25fps, usually nobody will notice except the sound people. but as mentioned by others, it's going to be replaced by the multitrack audio anyway and that is usually synched by timecode. on HDMI you usually end up with 1-3frames delay on picture anyway, so it will actually help to keep things in sync : ) but even if you have a zero latency video feed, 1 frame is not really bad. and if he's looking at the actors directly instead of the monitor (yeah, right) then the sound through the air and through the IEM will actually be in sync.

Or glue : )

they mention a robust one channel mode: XROC (Extreme Ruggedized One Channel) When RF congestion at a venue or event is at its worst, activate the exclu- sive Xirium Pro XROC feature and eliminate any opportunity for offending RF traffic to affect your wireless audio signal. I could imagine that on events wifi congestion is even worse then on most film sets, so they probably thought about this problem.

agreed that a two box solution can be cumbersome, but the question was about the „best sounding“ and not the „most convenient“. about the 5ghz, they mention a robust transmission mode if one only needs one channel:

I‘m curious if anybody had the chance to test this since it’s been out for a while, features and specs look pretty cool: https://www.neutrik.com/media/10371/download/XIRIUM PRO-USA 202004_EN-V5.pdf?v=2

if I were looking for the *best* wireless audio quality I‘d try a Sonosax SX-M2D2 Preamp with the AES into a Neutrik Xirium system. haven‘t used either of these yet, but based on specs and company reputation I‘m pretty confident that it would sound fantastic.

CHANGELOG Added line out balanced (mono) mode interesting, so for a single mic it seems that it can be used as a balanced preamp now.

I‘d imagine this is a situation where 32bit floating point recording could be really useful...

the price mentioned in the article is 400USD. I didn't know about the Zoom H3-VR, that capsule looks very similar indeed.

new recorder from zoom: https://www.newsshooter.com/2020/07/03/zoom-h8-eight-track-recorder/ Not terribly good looking in my opinion (to put it gently), but they also announced an ambisonic capsule, so could be an affordable compact way to play around with ambisonic sound.

how should we know? : ) seriously, there are so many factors, some of them very subjective... like: how much money do you have to burn for your hobby? how critical is sound quality to you? and reliability? what kind of equipment do you like and which one annoys you? the truth is that nearly all of todays equipment is more then good enough for nearly everything in hobby or semi-professional use. I spend way too much time looking at gear myself instead of going out and learning the important stuff. I comfort myself that I get some pleasure out of it, but I‘m brutally aware that for most things it really doesn‘t matter and that I‘d learn more by actually using low tech gear then endlessly researching high-end equipment.

I think what people mean is that it auto detects frame rate and sets the internal timecode to match

To add one more thought: If the takes are very long (music gigs?) it might be worth checking if the camera have genlock in and use a recorder that has that too.

Last time I checked those were rather expensive in germany due to import.. Didn‘t find any good lavs on a budget so far, I‘ve heard the new ME2 should be decent, the Deity standard lav might be worth trying, and I hope Tentacle will come up by a good bundled solution for their recorder. but for important stuff you probably want to get a sanken or dpa anyway.

If you only connect the timecode box for a short moment at the beginning and run long takes anyway, I don't really see the benefit over doing a clap once every hour when you start a new take. Actually I'd argue a clap is safer, and it doesn't take more then a few minutes to synch up as well.

I know the temptation to go endlessly back and forth on all this, but frankly why don't you just rent the three most likely candidates (I'd go with CS-M1, 8060 and DPA 4017C or miniCMIT if you have the money) for a day or two and record the way you typically do your projects? all fantastic options and it will tell you 10 times more then endlessly studying online info and thinking about this in theory. more fun too chris

not going to happen. they are both lovely mics and sound quite similar, the 8050 is smaller, cheaper and has more low end if you need that, but that makes it also more prone to handling errors. The 50 is more forgiving in that regard and has filter options, but is larger and cost a bit more. btw, they are from the MKH series and not MKE

Can you do the jobs you have with your current gear? Do you enjoy working with it? Do you have money to spend? Do you have enough jobs that pay rental for new items? etc...