Topic: Generic shock mount for Schoeps type mic?

[DSatz]

voltronic, your point (disagreeing with my phrase "fairly useless in practice") is well taken for people such as yourself, for whom a good tie-off arrangement is almost second nature; I bet you would almost never think of NOT doing it.

But when a shock mount doesn't give you the means for doing the tie-off, the onus lands on you for the required extra effort and planning, and bringing along the extra bits such as Velcro straps. Each aspect of that is a potential "point of failure" for people whose technical self-discipline and awareness may not be perfect all the time. If I forget something when I pack for a recording, I won't have time to go back home and get it. To have some anxiety about that is part of my personality, and I want to reduce that anxiety (and, of course, the rate of actual, practical failures due to my forgetting something) as much as I reasonably can.

Maybe more to my point, judging from what I see, for a lot of people the necessity of a good cable tie-off isn't "second nature" at all--they've never heard of it, or they think it doesn't matter much, or whatever (I can't read their minds). But it doesn't get done, I see it a lot and I'm sure that you see it, too. Even in studios and (in the past, before wireless became so prominent) on television.

For me personally--I mean, the Shure rubber donuts are an elegant design that "says what it means" visually. Also, they're fun to play with; I would gladly give one as a toy to a two-year-old. But after a while I stopped using them, because for me, it's normal for a shock mount to have a tie-off mechanism of some kind--so to my way of thinking, I have to cater specially to shock mounts that don't (in the ways mentioned earlier). Call that circular reasoning or perception, but that's how it looks from where I live.

--best regards

[voltronic]

^ Thanks for explaining your thinking.  I understand where you are coming from.

Not to belabor this point, but to follow along your reasoning regarding what may or may not be second-nature to those with minimal experience:

I believe one needs a certain level of background knowledge and/or experience in order to:
a) recognize the presence of an integrated tie-off point, unless specifically featured by the manufacturer in the packaging / manual, and,
b) know how to use it correctly with a sufficient loop as you previously described.

Case in point: Look at the sales photo from Rode that I posed earlier which shows an integrated cable attachment point being used in the worst possible way.  I've seen other similar examples of improper usage before that give people a very false picture of how this should be done.

Come to think of it, photos on manufacturer and retailer websites showing proper cable dressing are difficult to come by.  I did some searching for a while, and this was the only good one I could find:
https://www.adorama.com/ry041106.html

[John Willett]

For problems with handling noise on a boom, a key point is to pinch off and isolate a loop of slack cable along with the microphone, so that the mike can float and (if necessary) wobble freely within its suspension without its motion being constrained AT ALL by the cable. Otherwise, vibrations enter the microphone through the cable--to a much greater extent than you would probably suspect.

Shock mounts such as the Shure rubber donut, the Sabra or most Chinese knockoffs of the Schoeps A 20 are fairly useless in practice because they don't allow you to do this.

--best regards

Correct - I have a bundle of teh Rycote short and flexible XLR tails that I use between the microphone and the main cable - clamping the end with the clamp on the INV series suspensions.

Talking to the designer he told me that this can have more of an isolation effect than the shockmount itself.