^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ What he said. Chris builds battery boxes too. Ask him for a quote on something like CAFS and bbox or CA-11 omnis & bbox for omni/st**lth, or maybe CA-11 cards & bbox for stealth cards. The CA-14's are a bit larger, and also come as either cards or omnis, but they have built in windscreens & a flatter frequency resopnse. (If I'm not mistaken) I have a set of CA-14's and a battery box coming, (hopfully in the next week or so), as I've listened to alot of recordings done with these mics and LOVE the results people are getting!
Perhaps Chris will chime in here in a little bit. I hope he does as he'll be better able to help you select the mics that will work the best for what you intend to record. To quote Chris, microphones are like paint brushes. The thing is, it can be sorta hard to tell an artest which brush to use to get the imiage that's in his or her head onto the canvas. That's why I love that analogy so much. But as a beginning taper wanting to stealth, certain mics are going to be a bit more forgiving than others, and give you better results. Just like an art teacher can help guide a new artest to a particular brush to start off with, even moreso if the student can give the instructer some idea of what sort of painting they want to do, so can the hundreds of more experianced tapers here help to guide you to a starting point.
It'll be helpful to know WHAT you'd like to tape mostly. Loud rock shows, or "quieter," rock/acoustic? I imagine given you want to st**lth, we're probably talking about loud rock shows here, and that's a good thing. You'll have more success and better sounding recordings using just a battery box (BB) and not a, "pre." (Microphone pre-amplifier for the sake of clarity.) A pre is pretty important is you're recording quieter sources. It amplifies the signal coming to the recorder from the mics. However, they do cost a good bit more than a battery box.
Next is the question of, do you want alot of bass in your recordings? Do you have any interest in capturing the shows as faithfully as possible to what it sounded like when you were there, or do you want to be able to kind of taylor the sound on the fly? (IE maybe roll a bit of that bass off, as most loud rock shows actualy kind over-do the low frequencys, and though it sounds pretty cool at the show, it's sounds muddy when playing it back later.) If you'd like to get a faithful archive of the show the way it sounded there, you can always do what is called, "post production work, or "post." Using software like Adobe Audition, Cool Edit Pro or Audacity, you can re-eq the recording, make changes to the dynamics and tons more. I personaly love working in post as much as I love going to and archiving (taping) the shows.
If you're really looking to give something back to this community, I'd suggest that I think most people prefer recordings that are as faithful a reproduction of the show as possible, and to do their own post production work to get it sounding they way THEY personaly like a recording to sound should they choose to do any post at all. After all, this IS about archiving something, and any archivist will tell you the whole idea is to archive the ORIGINAL, not an altered copy of the original.
I sure hope you enjoy taping as much as I do. The more tapers there are out in the world, the more that's being added to the trading pool and the less shows that, "slip between the cracks," allowing potentialy once in a lifetime perfomances to be lost forever.
-JT
Topic: Newbie question regarding mic selection (Read 4732 times)