Topic: DIY basket style windscreens - AKA ghetto Rycotes

[Gutbucket]

These egg shapes could work great for standard body mics with a hole cut in the pointy end for the mic body to pass through, maybe.


Bought mine locally, but found those and the globes for $2.50 ea, 1/2 way down this page I frequent.

[Gutbucket]

Update- Don't bother building these for pressure omni mics.

I now never use these for the DPA 4060s I built these for.  The small foam screens work very well even in relatively windy conditions.  When I use the ball-shaped DIY acoustic pressure equalizer attachments with those mics to give them increased directionality, generic foam ball windscreens designed to fit over Sure SM-58 type ball mics works well.  I trim them down to form half spherical foam shells that fit over the APE spheres and protects the flush capsules from wind.

Today a found a TS thread titled 'Everything you ever wanted to know about windscreens' with a link to a c.1991 article from Jörg Wuttke of Schoeps analyzing windscreen performance and confirming my suspicions.  His conclusion is to always use a foam windscreen on pressure omnis.  He also recommends foam screens on directional mics where ever possible, as long as the foam offers enough protection for wind turbulence.  The high-frequency loss with a foam screen can be generally compensated for with EQ. Basket types suffer from internal reflections and complicated response errors at higher frequencies, but can offer more low frequency protection for more problematic wind with directional mics.

Interestingly, he explains that ANY windscreen reduces the directivity of a directional mic. The more effective it is at wind noise reduction, the more it screws with the polar pattern of the mic. Is I understand it, since the job of a windscreen is to reduce air velocities of turbulence around the capsule + vents, it also tends to reduce localized differences in pressure between those points which directional mics use for achieving their patterns. He explicitly warns against trying to increase effectiveness by putting a foam screen inside a basket screen when using directional mics because of the significant loss of their normal pattern.