Topic: SBD gain vs. Pre-amp?

[philfernandez]

My set up is Church 14's and the Church 9100.  I also have Church 11's.  Could I run either set of mics through a little SBD by using the gain to act as a pre?  My goal is to run a 4 mic mix.  I've got a 6 channel Behringer mixer that has gain on two channels.  Those are what I would use to power the mics without the pre.  Any thoughts?  Thanks!

[Javier Cinakowski]

The church mics require something called plug-in-power.  Your 9100 provides this for your mics (along with a preamp gain stage).  Unfortunatly the mixer does not have plug-in-power, but rather phantom power (not compatable and will damage you church mics).  You could use the 9100 for one set of mics, but you would be left without power for the other.  Naiant.com sells phantom power adapters for your type of microphone, so you could use them with your mixer. 

All that said, I would recomend just sticking with the 2 channel recordings. 

[Javier Cinakowski]

This is taking me back to my early days of taping.  The following is really bad advice, but I made some intersting recordings with it:

I had a pair of Core-Sound LCB's, a pair of LCSC's, a SP-Preamp and a legacy Sony Mini-Disc Recorder.  This is a very similar setup to your church rig.  i too wanted to run all 4 of my mics.   I used a headphone splitter out of the SP-preamp and ran both sets of mics.  It worked, but I am sure someone here could explain all the electrical, phase and impedance problems better than me.....

Have fun and experiment!

[Church-Audio]

I'd question whether you really want the Behri mixer in the chain.

The stuff is so bad you can't even say the name 

[phil_fernandez]

Thanks for all the feedback.  Looks like I won't be trying my experiment - the last thing I want to do is ruin the mics.  I'm really impressed with them.  As for the Behringer - I'm sure it's not a professional piece of gear, but it has served me pretty well with some matrix efforts in local clubs.  I get a SBD feed and mix in the AUD signal from my mics.  Most of the bands are more than satisfied with the results...

Thanks again for the advice - and thanks to Chris for the fine product!

[Church-Audio]

Thanks for all the feedback.  Looks like I won't be trying my experiment - the last thing I want to do is ruin the mics.  I'm really impressed with them.  As for the Behringer - I'm sure it's not a professional piece of gear, but it has served me pretty well with some matrix efforts in local clubs.  I get a SBD feed and mix in the AUD signal from my mics.  Most of the bands are more than satisfied with the results...

Thanks again for the advice - and thanks to Chris for the fine product!

The problem with the behringer is that the noise floor is so bad it would be unusable as a mic preamp for live recording as far as a line input mixer signal to noise ratio is not as important and noise is not as much of an issue because you don't need the same amount of gain as you would with a mic level signal. Jon at Niant makes a good Electret mic to phantom adaptor that would power my mics if you were really interested in trying it.

Chris

[digifish_music]

Thanks for all the feedback.  Looks like I won't be trying my experiment - the last thing I want to do is ruin the mics.  I'm really impressed with them.  As for the Behringer - I'm sure it's not a professional piece of gear, but it has served me pretty well with some matrix efforts in local clubs.  I get a SBD feed and mix in the AUD signal from my mics.  Most of the bands are more than satisfied with the results...

Thanks again for the advice - and thanks to Chris for the fine product!

Don't worry too much about the people around here, Behringer mixers are in use all over the world in professional and semi-pro applications.

digifish