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Gear / Technical Help => Microphones & Setup => Topic started by: taper420 on May 08, 2006, 06:05:34 AM
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So heres the deal... many years ago my father sent me on a mission to buy this mic for him and so I did. We plugged it in and it didnt work. Somehow I came to the conclusion that I needed a phantom power box, even though our mixer supplies it so it got put on the shelf until I picked one up. Which was right before a festival so I grabbed that mic and the only other mic I had which was a shotgun and proceeded to go on one of my first taping missions. This was my early days so i didnt really put too much mind into stereo pairing the mics, I just wanted to tape with what I had. I just did a quick search and i cant find the recording, but to my recollection, the mic was very low and distorted, if it worked at all....I think it did but the channel was unusable so basically I had a mono shotgun recording. Anyway, ever since that day and perhaps ever since it was bought the mic has never worked properly. I did some messing with it at first and managed to get a weak signal or just a hum by moving the jack around so I figured it must be somehting simple like a loose wire creating a grounding issue. For whatever reason we never thought to return it under warranty... or it was up by the time we actually realized we needed to. I tried opening the thing up and stripped a screw and couldnt get it open and so it sat there for years.
Until just recently i opened it back u again, grinded away the remaining screw nub and finally opend it up. Dam... no loose wires. That means it's passed my expertise. I figured maybe it got dropped and went bad but I couldnt help but remember the weak signal I got from it years ago...so I plugged it in.....nothing....
and then.... I was holding the metal around the base where the xlr connects .... and I touched the metal near the diaphram .... WE HAVE SIGNAL!!! With a loud hum that sounds like a ground loop as well......took my finger off the capsule..... no signal....then I tried different ways of holding the base, and was able to get a signal without touching the capsule by wrapping my hand fully around the base... but only if I held it at a certain distance from my body......and only in a certain way
so my conclusion is this is some kind of grounding issue with the mic, not a blown capsule, which means it may be possible to fix myself or be worth it to pay someone to fix.....but i have no idea about where to go or who to ask about this except for you guys, so what do you think...?
Is there hope?
p.s. its not the cable