Topic: How to best use the Sony ECM-717 mic (and/or user's experiences)...?

[Liquid Drum]

Sorry to hijack but I have a small question...

I have Batt-Box and a Sony MZ-RH910.

If I go line-in I assume that it'll be quiet, BUT...

If I go Batt Box > Line-in will it be louder??

I have yet to test this all out (will do next week) but I'd like to know becasue I had to boost some of my recordings a while back (when I didnt have a batt box) and obviously its better to not have to boost it too much.

Cheers,
Simon.


P.S. oh by the way, I'm testing Chris's Church audio Cardioids with this set-up 

[Bart.VL71]

It will be much louder.

[mysterymadman]

Hiya all,

Well, live and learn, experiment and improve...

I did just that since I started this thread, and lo and behold: I think I've got it worked out to my satisfaction (yes, I realise that the actual show will have different sound conditions, so I'll still have to fiddle around with the levels etc., but at least the approach that tends to give best results for me is clear).

For the classroom rehearsals, I find the best results are obtained using the powered mic jack, with the recorder's sensitivity set to low and the levels manually set to the maximum. That way, the overall volume seems to be around the sixth bar (on a scale from 0-10, where 7 is about recommended), and only the drums tend to peak over that substantially. These, however, do not really seem to get clipped, and the dynamic range of the rest of the instruments sounds very pleasing to me.

Last Monday I have recorded the practice rehearsals again, and even in raw format they sound pretty good to me. I've sampled them into the PC using two strategies, being:
1) 'Soft' sampling (i.e. making sure all drum peaks fall just within the regular scale, and hence no clipping on the sampling side occurs). I applied Audacity's 'normalisation' filter to it, such that the end result is better evened out. Sounds pretty darn good to me. For a sample (check out the guitar player, and note that this is just an 18 year old kid!), check: http://www.millennics.com/test/ritfw_soft.tar.gz
2) 'Loud' sampling (i.e. making sure the overall volume is better spread over the regular scale, at the expense of several drum peaks falling out of it). I found this doesn't sound very clipped, and I applied a 'soft limiter' (i.e. Audacity's "compression" filter) to it. the judges are still out on which of the two works better, but I kinda prefer this one. For a sample, check: http://www.millennics.com/test/ritfw_hard.tar.gz

NOTE: both downloads are around 60MB in size, so if you have a slow connection, you may not want to download them...

Especially the latter shows a very nicely even balanced spectrum over all the frequencies in my stereo's spectrum analyser.

Now, I'm hoping that at the Iron Maiden show the drums are better in balance with the overall volume of the other instruments, such that the inbalance between the two of those is less than at these practice rehearsals. If so, and if we can get good recording spots, I have good hope that the recordings will be coming out pretty well...

Cheerz,
MM