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Gear / Technical Help => Microphones & Setup => Topic started by: Grimod on September 21, 2024, 11:50:40 AM
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Last week at IBC, Schoeps launched a shotgun capsule called the KMIT. It works with analogue amplifiers, such as a CMC 4, CMC 6 or CMC 1, and with the new digital CMD 42.
For people who have an amplifier that they can use with a KMIT, at US$1575 it’s $800 cheaper than buying a CMIT 5.
The Schoeps page on the KMIT is at https://schoeps.de/en/products/shotgun-microphones/cmit-series/kmit.html
Schoeps also has a video about the mike on its YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC0Zjuf_f80
This 2017 forum thread might interest some:
Why no Schoeps shotgun capsules?
https://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=183945.msg2243413#msg2243413
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Thank you for sharing!
Always exciting to see a new Schoeps release.
This is cool.
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Love this idea.
A little concerned that all of the leverage against the Schoeps capsule threads (from the extended length) will strip those threads though.
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The total weight of a KMIT is less than two ounces, and its length less than five inches. The physically dense parts--the active electronics and the transducer "innards"--are located immediately behind the connector where the housing threads are. The interference tube that constitutes the major part of any shotgun mike's length is screened against wind, but hollow. Despite the effect of leverage, its weight doesn't put much stress on the threads, the capsule's connector rings, or the amplifier's socket.
Incidentally, with many other shotgun mikes you always have to keep one particular side of the capsule on top in order to get the specified pattern and frequency response--but the Schoeps shotguns, including the KMIT, are radially symmetrical. The capsule "innards" of the KMIT are exactly the same as those in the CMIT shotguns, set within the 20 mm diameter of Colette-series mikes instead of 21 mm.
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The total weight of a KMIT is less than two ounces, and its length less than five inches. The physically dense parts--the active electronics and the transducer "innards"--are located immediately behind the connector ...
I agree, but my concern is that the long shotgun cap is essentially a long lever against the cap's threads. The shotgun cap itself is light and the weight is placed so that it won't bother the threads. But, when someone bumps the end of the shotgun cap (esp. with a shotgun mic, they're designed to move around), then that may strip the threads. Schoeps threads are not designed to take leverage.
Hopefully it's a non-issue, but I am suspicious. I would want some kind of sleeve around the threaded joint if I used it on my nice CMC1 pre's. Actually, a velcro sleeve would be one simple/light way to solve the problem address any potential issue that might arise, if such an issue did arise.
EDIT: goodcooker is correct below that I am anticipating a potential problem but neither I nor anyone else knows whether it is a problem at this point
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solve the problem
I don't think it's fair to call this a problem unless it's actually a problem not just something you anticipate to be an issue without actually having any evidence in practice.
Schoeps is one of, if not THE most reputable manufacturers of microphones. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't release a new microphone capsule to a loyal, mostly professional users market without ensuring that it would act as expected and not strip out the threads in normal use.
This is the kind of thing that turns repeated speculation into "facts". "Someone over on forum X said that the mic threads on these new capsules break after one bump".
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solve the problem
I don't think it's fair to call this a problem unless it's actually a problem not just something you anticipate to be an issue without actually having any evidence in practice.
Schoeps is one of, if not THE most reputable manufacturers of microphones. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't release a new microphone capsule to a loyal, mostly professional users market without ensuring that it would act as expected and not strip out the threads in normal use.
This is the kind of thing that turns repeated speculation into "facts". "Someone over on forum X said that the mic threads on these new capsules break after one bump".
Post edited to reflect your comment, which is reasonable. I am a machinist and know a few things about threaded aluminum. However, I agree -- I am anticipating a potential problem that may in fact not exist. I also agree that Schoeps engineers tend to know what they're doing. FWIW, these are not the only threads I worry about -- the LEMO threads on the back of my CMC1L make me nervous, too, as do the microdots on my DPA 4060's. So far no problems, but I absolutely baby those things given what I know about short threaded studs in soft materials...
EDIT: looks like the CMIT may have threads in the same place already, in which case threads on a removable capsule would be nothing new / nonissue.
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It's not aluminum; it's brass. Aluminum (with a thicker wall) is used in the CMIT microphones, but not the KMIT.
--best regards
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wow, might be great for "what we do" with a mk8 for m/s
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But it's still blue?! lol
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The Schoeps lineup at AES NY last week. The trusting Schoeps folks leave the wares loose so you can handle them, as if they were free samples. DSatz advising in the background.
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cool! always nice to see new gear and options out there for folks.
i know that schoeps also has the CMIT 5 they advertise as "suitable for music recording" https://schoeps.de/en/products/shotgun-microphones/cmit-series/cmit-5.html
schoeps shows their frequency range as 40 Hz - 22 kHz
i often run a AKG ck8 pair when somewhat far from the source, or in a boomy room, which have range of 30Hz - 20 kHz
often, i think folks shy away from utilizing shotgun capsules in our type of recording, due to lack of low-end reproduction upon playback. but i have found the ck8 to be pretty adequate in this department.
with that being said, the KMIT is listed as 70Hz - 22kHz with CMC 1/CMC 6 or 70Hz - 40kHz with CMC 6xt/CMD 42. i don't know enough to really be sure, but would these be OK for live 2-channel recording in the manner that we do?
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^ Not sure specifically about that model or its use as stereo pair, but I've also found a shotgun-microphone can be used to advantage for live performance recording from an audience position.
Don't mean to take this OT, but I've been using an AT BP4029 stereo shotgun mic in the center position of my multi-microphone arrays for the past year or so, and am liking the bit of additional clarity it provides. When compared to the supercardioid Mid it replaced, it makes for a more forward-discriminating Mid pattern in that Mid/Side coincident-stereo center pickup position, and is flanked in the array by other mics which extend low-frequency response, provide ambient/room/audience pickup, and serve to mask any pattern artifacts from the interference tube, which I fortunately don't hear when solo'd anyway.
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combined reply to a few different messages above:
-- At the AES show, actually I don't see myself in the above photo; the darker-shirted belly is that of Dr. Helmut Wittek, co-CEO of Schoeps in Germany, while the guy with the Starbucks cup, perhaps inadvertently showing "the finger" while talking, is Scott Boland from Redding Audio, Schoeps' distributor in the U.S. and Canada. -- About 90% of the smaller, easily stolen items on display (e.g. the majority of the amplifiers and nearly all of the capsules) are dummies with serial number 00000 or the like. They might give disappointing results if you tried to record with them. From time to time some of them get stolen, and I've always wondered what people actually do with them. A kind of "collector" mentality is fairly prevalent among people who record sound, though, so maybe it's not that mysterious.
-- About shotgun mikes, the thing that always needs to be remembered is that their pickup pattern gets narrow only above some frequency that's generally in the upper midrange. That frequency is a function of sound wavelengths in comparison to the length of the interference tube in front of the capsule; the longer the tube, the lower the transition frequency. If a sound source is (say) 90° off-axis, its pickup isn't affected by the tube in the bass or most of the midrange. Then above the transition frequency it starts to be filtered--but irregularly so, with peaks and dips depending on the frequency, the exact angle of arrival, and certain details of the tube's construction.
If you're recording outdoors, or in a dry indoor acoustic and/or close to the intended sound source, this is all fine. The sound source that you want comes in on-axis, while any/all other sound sources are both (a) weakened by the mike's directional pattern in general and (b) filtered by the interference tube so that their treble content is weakened even further. The intended source will be distinctly the clearest-sounding thing that you pick up. All well and good. Note however that film and video sound mixers still have to get even a shotgun mike as close to the talent as the frame of the shot allows, and they also pay a lot of attention to precise aiming.
But if you use a shotgun mike in a reverberant space that has one predominant sound source (being spread throughout the space by a P.A. system) and you're not close to that sound source, the material reaching the sides of the mike will be largely the same as what's also arriving on-axis. The direct and reflected sound arrives via different paths within the room, each with its own path length (= delay time). So you're mixing together the original source plus multiple, filtered versions arriving at slightly different moments and various angles. Under those conditions, the effect of the interference tube is to create highly irregular phase cancellations in the upper midrange and treble--I mean peaks and valleys of 6 - 10 - 12 dB or even more in the response at various frequencies.
Shotgun microphones are thus a poor choice where diffuse sound is predominant. They're usable in such situations, but can't create a better balance of direct vs. reflected sound energy than what exists where you place them. They may look as if they were designed to solve the distance problem, but that's a category error/illusion. The only real solution is to place your microphones where a basically good balance already exists.
So much for mono pickup. If you want to use a pair of shotguns for stereo, remember once again that their directional pattern is quite different above the transition frequency than below it. So what distance and angle do you set between them? All the usual suggestions and formulas go out the window, being based on the assumption of a consistent frequency response across the microphone's pickup angle, which no shotgun microphone can possibly have. That leaves either spaced microphone (A/B) stereo or mid-side (M/S) recording, which nearly all "stereo shotguns" are based on. But M/S doesn't work well in diffuse sound fields. The "M" microphone needs to be where it could make a satisfactory mono recording if it were there by itself. (When the M/S technique was introduced in the early 1950s, all recording engineers were experienced at recording in mono, since that's all that had existed up to then, and European engineers went heavily for M/S stereo because it was compatible.)
In general the "reach" of a shotgun, even a long one, isn't much greater than that of a supercardioid--and of course below the transition frequency it's no greater at all -- zero. I think people really need to get the visual image (the "telescope" concept, or the telephoto lens) out of their heads.
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^ Thanks for clarifying that. I almost refrained from mentioning my usage in the post above because.. well, because everything you outline in your post above is correct and I very much do not want to come across as contradicting it, yet at the same time, we need to acknowledge that a lot of concert tapers have historically made and continue to make good sounding recordings using shotgun microphones despite all the good reasons why such microphones are not intended for such an application and are not the recommended choice for good reason. They can be made to work, sometimes quite well, although it can certainly be argued that other patterns and/or other arrangements might have worked even better.
More specifically, the way in which I've been using a stereo shotgun has proven helpful and productive in practice, presumably because some of the details of its use sufficiently skirt around the aforementioned problems. I don't want to get too O.T. in my speculation about why that is in this thread so will just outline a few reasons, and am happy to take up the discussion elsewhere. But in brief, I think the main reasons it's working for me are: There remains sufficient direct sound arriving at the recording position to allow an interference tube pattern in a dedicated forward-facing channel to effectively parse enough of that out to a degree that is useful (granted, in a way that is not entirely uniform across the entire frequency range); Although that non-uniformity of response is not ideal, in conjunction with the other channels of the array it becomes non-problematic in a frequency-response sense, while providing a sufficient degree of usefulness in the directional sense; Other channels of the array dedicated to diffuse field pickup are arranged in such way as to reduce sensitivity to front direct-arriving sound, albeit to a similarly minor degree, such that the differentiation between the two is significant enough to be useful. Interestingly, one detail of this is that sharp directional imaging is provided mostly by the stereo microphone triplet consisting of the shotgun center position and the adjacent near-spaced left/right supercardioid directional microphone channels, rather than by the shotgun Mid in direct combination with its Side channel. In isolation, the L/R output of the Mid/Side stereo shotgun provides a pleasant sense of stereo, if not the same sharp imaging it would produce when used up close, however that side channel ends up being useful mostly by providing an increased sense of width/depth/enveloping stereo-difference. As you mention, the Side channel may not pickup up enough direct sound to work effectively as a traditional Mid/Side pair in terms of sharp coincident stereo imaging, yet remains useful in the array for a different reason. For whatever reasons, it all works well together in a practical sense.
I really do not intend to draw focus to or confuse things with the non-standard way in which I record, so my apologies for the side-bar discussion. I mostly wanted to acknowledge a few exceptions to the excellent general guidance posted above, in support of JiB97's post about his experience using AKG short shotguns, in support of historical examples to which other tapers will relate, and in support of the specific but unusual example empirically determined to work well for me. End the end, I suppose this post is something of a poppa Berenstain Bear reply, with the general take away being, "Don't do like I do.. even though it sometimes works out". The best advice is to follow the guidelines DSatz mentions above, but don't feel bad about making an exception as long as it's producing the results you want and you understand the pitfalls.
[tentatively hits the Post button]
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I attest that my videoframe above shows DSatz behind Dr. Wittek! (only his hand and badge are visible)
I can post a nice still shot of the booth if DSatz does not mind being seen. He doesn't look at all like his avatar.
-- At the AES show, actually I don't see myself in the above photo; the darker-shirted belly is that of Dr. Helmut Wittek, co-CEO of Schoeps in Germany, while the guy with the Starbucks cup, perhaps inadvertently showing "the finger" while talking, is Scott Boland from Redding Audio, Schoeps' distributor in the U.S. and Canada. -- About 90% of the smaller, easily stolen items on display (e.g. the majority of the amplifiers and nearly all of the capsules) are dummies with serial number 00000 or the like. They might give disappointing results if you tried to record with them. From time to time some of them get stolen, and I've always wondered what people actually do with them. A kind of "collector" mentality is fairly prevalent among people who record sound, though, so maybe it's not that mysterious.
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Gary (slapping forehead--to be clear: mine, not yours), yes, I will own up to the green-clad paunch segment, fingers and badge. I hadn't noticed them there. (Busted.) If you'd shown my bald spot, I might have recognized myself sooner.
But enough about me. Gutbucket, the sound field generated by a large array of loudspeakers is peculiar -- it actually has things in common with an interference-tube ("shotgun") microphone, since there's generally increasing directivity of radiation at higher frequencies and a great deal of phase conflict, in this case from the multiple drivers operating in the same frequency range. The whole point is to push as much direct sound as possible as far back into the room as possible, in ways that acoustic instruments and human (or animal) voices can do only to a more limited extent. As a result, you can get mileage out of recording techniques that were originally developed for closer placement. How much mileage depends on circumstances that naturally vary tremendously among venues. So it's not entirely surprising that good sounding recordings can be made sometimes with equipment the choice of which can seem pretty random to someone who mainly records purely acoustic (e.g. classical) concerts.
If you're dedicated and you listen with an open mind to what you're doing, over time you can learn to make the best of almost any halfway reasonable setup. There's no good reason for anyone to be too parochial about How To Do This -- not that I'm saying anyone here is doing that, except maybe me from time to time. But even I try to limit myself to criticizing what I see as false concepts that could lead people into problem situations. A good recording still sounds good, even if I debunk someone's idea about how it got to be that way.
That said: People who record with small, omnidirectional condenser microphones have a range of good choices from quite inexpensive to quite expensive; the best sound best the most often, but good-sounding omnis can be found at all price levels. With cardioids it's somewhat less so--not necessarily because of the greater technical difficulty of producing them, but more because manufacturers are optimizing for different applications, especially communications (which calls for maximal speech intelligibility rather than musical sound quality) and also simply because most microphones are designed for a particular price point. Fortunately, most people here seem to realize that cardioids have many uses but aren't necessarily the center of the recording universe; they're problem-solvers.
But when you get to directional patterns beyond cardioid, it's quite different: There are whole levels of sound quality that simply aren't available from inexpensive gear. Unlike with omnis, there are no (say) $300 supercardioids that sound nearly as good on music (or even on speech, if you're a critical listener the way film sound people have to be) as the best professional supercardioids. Or figure-8s. And the same is even more true of shotgun microphones--that pavilion of the microphone zoo is a wild, wild mix.
Plus as with super- and/or hypercardioids, the features and qualities that make a particular shotgun mike tasty for dialog recording or voiceover work can very definitely undermine its goodness for music and vice versa. No manufacturer has ever offered shotgun microphones that were primarily designed for music recording or even to be "application agnostic" -- that would be a losing proposition. They're all made with dialog recording and other speech applications such as news reporting or voiceover work first and foremost in mind. A few of them can be considered for music recording if the circumstances call for it--but relying on them all the time would be accepting several unnecessary handicaps in my view.
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Thanks for that, I very much enjoy and benefit from your insights and expertise on all this.