To get you down to part numbers:
The mixer is a Peavey PV6…
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/PV6/
It will mix four different microphones into a show. Most of our training sessions use two. The trainer wears a Radio Shack Tie-Tack microphone…
http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2102927
That gets plugged into a custom connector adapter so it will plug into the Peavey. That’s the part I build. The microphone runs from a small internal watch battery and doesn’t need external power supplies.
The audience microphone is an omnidirectional hand-held that Radio Shack apparently no longer makes. It plugs straight into the mixer and we leave it in the middle of the audience – sometimes just on a chair. This takes a reasonably quiet room and I’d probably just use a second tie-tack microphone for this.
The mixer supplies headphone connections so the trainer can listen and tell if everything sounds OK. You can’t always plug into the computer to listen because of delay problems.
The Peavey plugs straight into a Mac or Deskside Windows PC to record the show. If you have a Windows laptop, your choices are a USB Sound Card like the UCA202 or just buy the Peavey with a USB built-in…
http://www.amazon.com/Behringer-UCA202-U-Control-Audio-Interface/dp/B000KW2YEI
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/PV6USB/
We tried cheap “disco” mixers and they tend to only have one microphone channel and it’s terrible. The Peavey has a “real” microphone channel design and will handle many different microphone types and actors with no problems. A couple of other similar sized and priced mixers surfaced on the forum and I have no experience with them.
There is such a need for this particular “product” that techniques have been designed to combine two microphones directly in the computer, but it’s only partially successful, it’s awkward to use, and you can’t do it across all computer types.
They make USB microphone mixers – where everything is USB – and I don’t know a thing about them except I bet they’re expensive.
Koz
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