What kind of mic should i buy?

[Ortmeyer]

I am going to buy a new mic, but i dont know which one i should get? Its going to be used primarily for talking. It should cost about 200-250$. Also i live in Denmark so dont link a page from America that you can order from.
Thanks.

[kozikowski]

For that amount of money it would help if we knew a little more about the show(s). You can do well in a podcast with the Logitech Desktop USB microphone. I did some of the sound test on this microphone and it works very much better than you would assume for its $19 price.

Once you run out of USB "Beginner" options, you slide neatly into a microphone, mixer and digital converter. That's more advanced, but you can do very, very well with those, but the price jumps. Now you're into a $100 sound mixer, $100 microphone plus cables and a $30 USB adapter.

You might save up some shekels to soundproof the room. I have done convincing voice tracks with the built-in microphone on my Mac, but I did it in a dead quiet, soundproof room.

From here you can leap into thousands and that sounds like a bad thing, but the point is, you can. USB microphones are aggressively unexpandable and not will not upgrade at all. We get posts all the time from people who "just want to connect two or three USB microphones to a computer."

Nope. Sorry.

Here's a "studio" I made from furniture moving quilts for a voice shoot. The microphone is a simple Shure SM-58 in a home-made vibration isolator.

http://www.kozco.com/tech/pvcShockMount/shockmount.html

http://www.kozco.com/pictures/boothFini ... op-mic.jpg

Koz

[Ortmeyer]

Well i am pretty experienced in recording and i have a good place to record. I have been using my microphone for a long time, and i am not doing a podcast, i do various things but it should be a good mic for narration? Any particular mic's that are good for narration?
P.s i am also buying a popfilter, and some other equipment.

[Ortmeyer]

Btw i found a mic i might buy, does this sound like a good mic?
- Polar pattern: Uni-directional
- Frequency-range: 30 Hz -18 kHz
- Sensitivity: -32dB (0dB=1V/Pa at 1kHz)
- Max. Input SPL: 140dB (at 1kHz

[kozikowski]

What is it? We can't cross that to personal experience or known problems. It's always a danger sign when they say "uni-directional." That usually means they're not going to tell you what the actual sound pattern is, just "trust us on this." That's a beginner microphone.

USB microphones can work very well, but they have many known problems. Because there is no mixer board to set, they have to record low level. High level overloading is fatal. In a couple of famous cases, the low volume meets the noise floor of the microphone and you'll never get a good product out of it past yelling.

Koz

[steve]

What do you intend to plug the microphone into? Do you have a mixing desk or microphone pre-amp? If you do, then how do you connect that to your computer (assuming that you intend recording on a computer).

[Ortmeyer]

Does anyone have a suggestion for a good mic? Or at least what it should have as a minimum frequency range and such?

[steve]

It depends what you are plugging into.
If you already have a mixing desk (or a microphone pre-amp) with phantom power and some high quality means of connecting the desk/pre-amp to your computer, then the Rode NT1-A would be worth considering. If you don't have the means to connect a phantom powered microphone to your computer, then the cost of also buying the necessary hardware to connect the microphone to your computer will probably push the NT1-A beyond your budget.

[kozikowski]

People at work have NT1A microphones and they're very happy with them.

I use an AKG 414XL. The vocal version. That's it recording a guitar (not the best use, but it works).

http://www.kozco.com/tech/MicTests/studioLayout.jpg

That's a Peavey PV6 sound mixer (with 48v phantom turned on) and a Mac Stereo Line-In. I have a picture -- somewhere -- of me recording a radio show with it.

Koz