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Brian McCarty, an audio professional presently living in Australia, seeks to conduct a series of tests to evaluate subtleties of microphone performance. His theory is that the shift away from interference tube microphones to cardioid and hypercardioid designs yielded an improvement in the intelligibility of dialog recording. Even if background noise increased slightly with the less directional designs, the dialog itself was more understandable and this more than compensated for the additional noise. He will be in Los Angeles later this month and would like to conduct some controlled tests to produce data to prove this theorem. He expects to be here from about the 17th to about the 22nd. Some tests will be done in a workshop under controlled conditions. He would also very much like to make some tests on an active set. The idea is to rig two microphones, one with an interference tube and one without, to a single boom and make matching recordings of dialog in a real-world environment. The resulting recordings would then be carefully evaluated for any differences in intelligibility. He is working in close association with Dr. Peter Mapp, a UK expert in audiology who has computer software that can help quantify any perceived differences. To make real world comparisons, he needs cooperation from someone working on a project who might be able to extend an invitation to visit the set and briefly encumber the boom operator with a second microphone. He would particularly like to conduct this test in an exterior scene but any working project would provide an opportunity to make meaningful tests. Probably the whole business could be accomplished in an hour or so. An independent production would probably be best as it is difficult to persuade the studios to allow anyone to make recordings, even briefly, and take away copies. Brian used to live in Los Angeles and was a member of both Local 695 and Local 700. He is presently the head of Coral Sea Studios in Australia (http://www.coralseastudios.com/index.html) and is also chair of the AES Technical Committee on Sound for Digital Cinema and Television. If you can help, please post here or send me a PM. Thanks very much. David

Here's a little something I found today while clearing out some old bookmarks - an in depth look at a few of the usual (and maybe not so usual) shotgun, hyper, super and cardioid suspects. Now, I did not write this and to be perfectly honest I don't know if I would agree with some of the stuff that this guys says (admittedly, he is a video guy apparently) but I thought it did make interesting reading and there are some decent samples recordings with each mic that he reviews. Apologies if this has been posted before, I did do a search (yes, on google) with no results, so here goes.. http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/right_mic_brockett.html Enjoy - Chak

Hey, Just a nice picture of a collection of short microphones. Been doing some comparison's lately on cardioids. The DPA is really nice IMO. It competes with the Schoeps. Sennheiser you need the pad/filter in there but also very nice. Thoughts on short mics? mounting options? windscreen protections? I'm not asking for anything specific - just your experiences.