I just bought a Sharp MD-R480 MiniDisc Recorder and I need a microphone to use with it. For those of you with experience with MDisc, is there a preference between “cabled” and “single-point T” mikes? Do you have any recommendations?
Thanks in advance
Like everything else in life, there’s tradeoffs.
I use cabled mikes, I think they’re the premium cardoid from “sound professionals”. www.soundprofessionals.com This ain’t professional equipment, but that’s what they call themselves. Actually sound pretty good.
But back to the tradeoffs.
The single point T mikes are certainly smaller than cabled mikes, they’re pretty convenient. Their biggest drawback is that you might get motor noise from the disc recorder. You’ll notice when you’re recording that the disc doesn’t spin all of the time, stuff gets buffered into memory, then every couple of seconds, the thing spins up the disc and writes out some data. With the mike directly connected, you have a better chance of getting motor noise (or more likely disc in its plastic case noise) picked up by the mike.
Cabled mikes are farther from that electric motor, and that’s a good thing, but the cables are more stuff to fuss with. If you shake the cable, you’re likely to get “bumpity” noise from the mechanical shock picked up in the recording. You can probably get cabled mics with better transducers than in the little T thingies.
In all cases, you need to be careful about extra noise sources, vibration, wind, things bumping against the table where you’ve set your microphones. I’ve found puting microphones inside a knitted mitten helps a lot with wind noise. Sometimes I think good recording takes as much practice as good playing!
I use a small egg shaped mike which sticks on the mini disc with velcro. It came from Maplins and is a computer mike. I find mine is excellent for taping my tutor during our group lessons.