Sonic Ingénieur, Producer, and Creator of the {{– whiteLABEL –}} range of vst plugins
another simple mic idea - an old pair of headphones (from boots the chemist!) with the speakers removed and holes drilled to accommodate a capsule for each ear. wired straight to a stereo minijack, this enables recording with a portable minidisc recorder by plugging into … you guessed it … the mic input. have tested and sounds good. will eventually get around to posting some mp3s of the results but ’till then here’s a pretty picture :
click on the image to view the Tansy’s Teddies example site :
[or here]
dead simple, dead cheap …
one capsule
one 3 pin stereo minijack (mono would be better, but I haven’t one lying around)
some spare wire
a lump of foam
joining left + and right + turns the stereo minijack mono. Soldering capsule + and - to joint + and regular - does the trick. the extra wire seems to help with grounding, and a foam head aids with handling noise and provides a little pop protection.
this mic works with the mic input on my laptop which provides the bias voltage, and overall, picks up less machine noise than the laptop internal mic and is obviously more mobile. hoorah.
a stereo electret mic with 9v battery power, assembled using sheets of lasagna for circuit boards (pcb = pasta curcuit board). An experiment to see if I could correctly assemble the resistors and capacitors required in order to power the capsules. It works !! no gain stage yet, but this mic plugs straight into line-level kit, including minidisc, mixer, harddisk recorders etc …
here, the mic is plugged into the line inputs of an old genexa (tandy) eq, and the resultant display is me coughing as I click ’shoot’
the ‘board’ is pretty simple, containing a single resistor and capacitor for each capsule, along with a shared 9v battery, thats pretty much it really. A second sheet of lasagna is hot-glued to the bottom of the top sheet - wires can be seen ‘between the sheets’ and all soldering is done directly onto the wires of the components, p2p stylie.
The resistor drops the voltage from the battery from about 9.5v (new battery) to about 7v which charges the electret. The capacitor blocks DC voltage from going out of the phono plugs (not shown) and into precious audio gear but lets the AC signal flow. The rest is solder, pasta, wire and bodgery, but it works, and sounds pretty good …