Apologies for the lack of new material but the mobile and the studio are so busy at the moment that weve just not had time to put any new stuff up. We have some great new sessions waiting to go up and a sneak preview of a fantastic new compresser but thats all to come!!!!! In the meantime have a read about the first in our series of great mics under £100
The
Sennheiser MKH 40 is the cardiod mic of the MKH range and is one
of those gold standard reference mics against which other mics
can be judged in terms of noise and general standards of construction.
Retailing at over £1000 its part of the MKH range of microphones
using Sennheiser’s unique and revolutionary symmetrical
push-pull capsule charged by low voltage RF. They are astonishingly
quiet and flat across the audio spectrum and belong to the class
of microphone loved by real audio purists in that they are designed
to be as accurate as technically possible. You see very few reviews
on the web for these mics but they are really very special in
a number of ways. They can be happily used in just about any studio
situation as long as you use a decent mount and pop shield but
they have really become the industry standard as the Middle mic
along with the MKH 30 figure 8 in what is probably the best M/S
mic arrangement available today.
Recording
I use an MKH 30 and 40 in the classiv Mid/Side
arrangement to record choirs and brass bands and they really are
just stunning. They capture exactly whats going on in the room
and I love the flexibility of M/S allowing me a lot of options
in post production. I use them mainly through a couple of channels
of the focusrite isa 428 which gives a very clean transparent
sound but I have also started using them with the budget GA pre-73s
which warms them up a bit, most recently on a piano recording
which turned out really well. I have them set up in a budget mic
cradle that I got from Thomann as the Senheisser MS cradle is
very expensive and as long as there is no vibration through the
floor it works perfectly. There's not a lot you can say about
mics like these and while they are undoubtably expensive they
are head and shoulders above the raft of budget mics filling the
market place today. They occasionally pop up on ebay and last
year I bought a pair of MKH30s from a theatre in Paris.
This set up in M/S has become the industry standard for location
stereo for tv,film and particularly wildlife recording where they
excel because of their small size and light weight and because
they are RF polarized are much less likely to be affected by damp
and humidity
Check
out the Check out the mid/side
video to hear how the techique works. JR
