A speaker is a microphone

  • Thread starter Thread starter ElDangeroso
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ElDangeroso

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I think this should be posted in the mic forum, but it's locked.

So I have an old 15" speaker from a PA. The foam is toasted and I already sold the cabs. I want to use this as a sub-kick mic. The coil still works fine, just the paper makes noise when I use it as a speaker.

How should I wire this? Will the missing foam cause bad noise??

Is this a retarded idea??


Thanks

Chad
 
i'm not there with you..so i dont know how far its gone.
NOTE...if you get it wired up ok....be carefull....it could pack a wallop in level.....turn up your gain very low on the mixer and watch your meters.
a good way to test it BEFORE putting it in your pro rig is to put a quarter inch male jack(from radio shack) attached to leads attached to the two terminals, then plug the phone jack into mic in of a cassette deck ,
so you get an idea of level put out. and you can hear what it sounds like by putting headphones into the phone jack of cass dek.
turn your level up carefully on cass dek so you dont pound your ears.
YOUVE BEEN WARNED.
it might sound good , it might not. worst case .....you can use it as a trigger to kik and other sounds in a sampler.
where ive found spkrs as mics can work are on kik, some guitar amps for a different colour, and as i said as a trigger to a sampler. peace.
 
on Sgt peppers lonely hearts club george martin attached a pair of headphones to a violin and used that as a mic :)

so yeah... it could theoreticaly sound nice... worth a try I guess
 
i've never done if but i've heard of a lot of engineers doing that exact same thing. using it to record kick drums. if i remember right, the way you have to do it is reverse the leads on the back of the speaker. you'll probably have to unsolder them and then do it.

again, this is all how i've HEARD it has been done. then you'll have to experiment with positioning. whether putting it in the kick drum or putting it right up against the head inside of a box, etc.
 
Actually, a speaker is NOT a microphone. But it is a transducer and can be used in place of a microphone <grin>.
Hook it up and try it. I don't think there will be a problem with the output level; it shouldn't be any different from a dynamic mic. It will not be nearly as accurate as a microphone, but maybe that's what you want.
 
how do you wire it

it has positive and negative leads, so which goes where on a 1/4 phone plug?
 
notbradsohner said:
how do you wire it

it has positive and negative leads, so which goes where on a 1/4 phone plug?
Click to expand...

you'd probably use an XLR connector so you can utilize your preamps. like i said....i heard that you were supposed to reverse the leads, so i'm assuming the + terminal would connect to pin 2 on XLR and - terminal would connect to pin 3. And then also connect the shield of the cable to the negative terminal. again, can anyone who might have done it before help me on this? :cool:
 
bennychico11 said:
you'd probably use an XLR connector so you can utilize your preamps. like i said....i heard that you were supposed to reverse the leads, so i'm assuming the + terminal would connect to pin 2 on XLR and - terminal would connect to pin 3. And then also connect the shield of the cable to the negative terminal. again, can anyone who might have done it before help me on this? :cool:
Click to expand...

This is correct. The reason to reverse the leads is so that the phase relationship i correct. Just like when you mic the bottom of a snare.
 
You can tie pin 1 and 3 together to make the unbalanced signal of the speaker compatible with the balanced XLR input.
If you want to run it as a balanced signal you can use a transformer such as this one from Ratio Snack.
You just use the transformer in reverse of it's intended use.
Connect the voice coil terminals of the speaker to the two 8 ohm wires on the transformer, which is listed as the secondary only in this case since we are running backward it now becomes the primary side.

There are three wires, color-coded, for the 1K center-tapped primary which now becomes our secondary. Treat this as a balanced mic line, center is ground, other two are plus audio and minus audio. Hook 'em to an appropriate XLR connector and you've got a pretty sensitive dynamic mic now.

If phase problems rear their ugly head when using with other mics, simply reverse the two speaker voice coil connections to throw the phase 180 degrees around.
 
Wire the positive and negative terminals to a 1/4" jack and plug it into the input of a DI box. Run the XLR output of the DI to your preamp. I've done just this with an Ampeg 15" speaker with the speaker input jack plugged into a DI box input. Its simple, really. Try it with a guitar cabinet if you have a spare lying around...plug the speaker cab's input into the DI input, and run that to your pre. Make some noise in front of the speaker cab. It'll work just fine...probably lo-fi and not very detailed, but it'll work.
 
there's a reason kick drum mics aren't 15" PA speakers.


What would bob katz do? He'd use a mic as a mic and a speaker as a speaker.
 
People tend to use the speaker out of an NS-10 (4 inches) It picks up a lot of low end. I don't know how well a 15 inch speaker will work. It would seem to take an awful lot of air pressure to move something that big.
 
fenix said:
or just use a real kick drum mic and stop being gay.
Click to expand...

hmm. i guess you must be one of thsoe 'buy the books' sort of people.

a lot of the time, the sterile methods don't always work to capture the sound you want. that's why you must improvise.

when we were doing one of teslas albums at work a while back, we couldn't get the snare to sound how we wanted to.

everyone seemed to notice how the heating element in the toaster in the lounge just so happened to sound like an actual snare. so what we ended up doing was actually dubbing over the snare while the drummer hit the damn toaster.

point of the story: be creative. and don't be a dick if someone comes up with an idea that may not sound good. this place is about learning.
 
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