Shopping for Mic Stands...

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wishtheend

New member
Anyone have any suggestions on what are some decent stands that won't break my wallet? I'm looking at 4 or 5 to be used when mic'ing drums (overheads, toms, snare, close mic'ed cymbals) and when mic'ing guitar cabs, so it would have to be able to extend for OH's.
 
If your standard tripod boom stand will suffice, you can get package deals from musiciansfriend.com...six On-Stage Stands tripod booms for $100 or ten Musicians Friend branded (which I suspect are just store-branded On-Stage Stands) for $100.
 
Adam P said:
If your standard tripod boom stand will suffice, you can get package deals from musiciansfriend.com...six On-Stage Stands tripod booms for $100 or ten Musicians Friend branded (which I suspect are just store-branded On-Stage Stands) for $100.
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They suck and they WILL break. I'll never buy another hunk of shit stand like those again. Even if I can only get 3 compared to 6. In the long run, you're better off with the better gear. TAMA makes a really nice stand for about $40
 
On-Stage isn't bad for light use. They do strip pretty easy, though. More than quality problems, I find them to be a pain in the ass to adjust, and to get them to stay where they are supposed to, because of the plastic parts.

If you want some really nice stands for relatively cheap, Northern Sound has great pricing on K&M stands. They have the 21090B, tripod with telescoping boom, all metal, for $45 each, $40 each if you buy 6 or more. List is $90, my local store sells them for $65. K&M will send you replacement parts if you need them, but I haven't in almost ten years.

Get a couple of shorties for amps, I like short round-bases with tele booms.

What ever you get, you will extend their life a lot if you loosen them up to adjust them every time, instead of just yanking on them.
 
HangDawg said:
They suck and they WILL break. I'll never buy another hunk of shit stand like those again. Even if I can only get 3 compared to 6. In the long run, you're better off with the better gear. TAMA makes a really nice stand for about $40
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I totally respect your opinion and know exactly what you mean and where you're coming from, hence my prefacing my statement by saying "If it will suffice".

That said, for someone who's recording only himself and doesn't have outside clients (like you do, if I'm not mistaken), I think less expensive stands would be perfectly suitable. I, for one, am not going to buy a $40 mic stand to hold my SM57 or my Oktava 012. On the other hand, I wouldn't put an expensive LDC on a cheap stand. Hell, I'm hesitant to put my v67 on a cheap boom stand.

I'm assuming (and very possibly wrongly so) that the thread starter is a novice recordist, given that A) he is asking for advice on stands to buy, which means he doesn't have them yet; and B) the ever-present quest for gear for bottom dollar. Based on that assumption and my limited personal experience, a cheap On-Stage stand should work fine for holding an SM57 or 012 or most other smaller budget mics.

Of course, like I said, once he is working with clients and dragging stuff out and setting up and tearing down on a daily basis, its probably time to move to more expensive stands, at least for critical applications.

As an aside, and I've been meaning to mention this for a while now, I don't know if I'm terribly lucky or what, but I have rarely had my stuff fail me, and its stuff that I've read many here claim to have fail within weeks or months. When I was 16 I bought a bunch of equipment for my band I was in at the time for our PA set up: mics, cables, stands, etc. In that I have several On-Stage boom stands that have never failed me in anyway, dropping a mic or stripping threads or anything. I have an 8-channel HOSA XLR-XLR snake that still works perfectly. I have a box full of cheap mic cables (and, as I one way discovered, some nice Belden/Switchcraft cables) and have only had one go bad. One of my two main instrument cables (I run a stompbox) is a Spectraflex cable that I bought 10 years ago and have probably coiled thousands of times (using the elbow/palm method, mind you) and it works like it did the day I got it, despite looking like absolute shit. Now I know its not being used rigorously day in and day out, but a lot of it was in at least weekly use for the better part of the past 8 years, and all of my gear has survived at least a dozen moves. Just thought I'd throw that out there.
 
Adam P said:
As an aside, and I've been meaning to mention this for a while now, I don't know if I'm terribly lucky or what, but I have rarely had my stuff fail me, and its stuff that I've read many here claim to have fail within weeks or months.
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You are right there is a difference between heavy and light use. Beyond that, I find that people who break stuff a lot, generally treat it like shit. Even good stuff lasts them a shorter time than it should.
 
The on-stage stands are, I believe, rebranded versions of the Nady MST-5B. It sucks. It doesn't weigh enough to hold a mic of any real size, and has trouble with the whole thing falling over with even an PG58.

Only thing good about it is that they're cheap. I bought one and several critical plastic parts were broken into multiple pieces when it arrived. Contacted the company and they sent a replacement and said "just toss it" because them shipping it to the manufacturer would be more than they'd get back from it.

Anyway, a little super glue and I have two. At a two-for-one price, it wasn't a bad deal, though still not very good. Yeah, they're that bad.

I have them holding a pair of Nady CM-90 condensers for drum overheads. Up until I switched to unusually lightweight mic cables, I had to have a weight on one of the stands just to hold up those tiny little condensers (5 ounces, or about 0.3 pounds).

The only inexpensive tripod mic stand I'd recommend would be the Tama brand. I have a crash cymbal, a splash cymbal, and a 10" tom mounted to one at the moment as part of my drum kit. I'm also using one with a Nady RSM-2 ribbon mic (just shy of a 3 pound mic), and I'm comforrtable having the boom extended. Now -that- is what a mic stand should be.

Repeat after me: I will not settle for a hamburger that costs two-thirds as much as filet mignon.
 
AKG/ K&M.

AEA makes some really nice stands too if you have $1200 laying around doing nothing.
 
I've been using a couple of the tripod mic stands [Musician's Friend branded] for over eight years now and never had a problem. Unless they've changed the manufacturer, design, and materials used, they are a steal at the current price.
 
Adam P said:
What parts, out of curiosity?
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Actually, looking at the pair together, just one part, though before I got the second one, it looked kind of like the base had a piece broken out of it. Turns out they just don't cut their holes very well, and that was normal.

Anyway, if you look at the boom part, there's a knob on top that's part of a bolt that screws through a plastic ring into a metal piece. The plastic ring holds that metal piece in place. That metal piece, in turn, keeps the boom from rotating and sliding in and out.

That plastic ring was broken into two or three pieces and the knob piece was lying loose in the bottom of the box with the metal plate still attached. Thus, any mic placed on it would end up pointing down very quickly.... Short of using it as a vertical stand, there wasn't much you could do with it without repairing the plastic retaining ring....
 
Interesting. In all of mine, the screw to hold the boom arm in the clutch threads directly into threads cut into the metal housing of the clutch. The only plastic part is the base (and the little cap on the end of the boom arm on the opposite end of where the mic goes). Perhaps they had a problem with it and changed the design. In any event, mine's never given me any trouble.
 
Adam P said:
Interesting. In all of mine, the screw to hold the boom arm in the clutch threads directly into threads cut into the metal housing of the clutch. The only plastic part is the base (and the little cap on the end of the boom arm on the opposite end of where the mic goes). Perhaps they had a problem with it and changed the design. In any event, mine's never given me any trouble.
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Maybe it's not quite the same stand. Mine has a plastic piece on both ends of the hinge block, and the screw goes through that plastic piece into the metal clutch plate, and the plastic piece holds the clutch plate in place.
 
The part the tightens the height of the stand is plastic on mine. I've had 2 of them break already. The only get light duty in the studio and still didn't hold up. As far as those Hosa cables, I bought an 8 channel 1/4 to 1/4 and half of them didn't work right out of the box. Sure if you jiggle them they would work. Who the hell wants to run a signal through a piece of shit like that. Not me. And people wonder why their recordings sound like shit. :rolleyes:

Sorry bout the rant, I just can't bring myself to recommend a shitty piece of gear.
 
go to a music store, guitar center or something, and look at the stands. Don't buy stands from mail order, they are too fragile for the gorillas in shipping. I have 3 $100 stands that work no better than my $20 on stage, they are better in applications that require distance (overheads, spaced pair foh) but for day to day crap they work fine
 
dgatwood said:
It doesn't weigh enough to hold a mic of any real size, and has trouble with the whole thing falling over with even an PG58.
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For me, light duty usage, on-stage has worked fine. YMMV.

One fun little trick is to use weightlifting weights on the stands to give them a LOT more stability cheaply. You just pop off the boom, slide the weight(s) down the main pole, and put the boom back on.

-lee-
 
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