afraid of damaging my mic

B

Bierman

New member
Hi All,

New here, my name's Jon Bierman and I'm setting up a location audio recording facility, based in London, called DLA. I'm also involved in a lot of dance music production, and I'm in a 10-piece drumnbass/breakbeat/world music band called Keiretsu (www.keiretsumusic.com)

I found your forum while trying to find out if I risk damaging my new Beyer Dynamic M160 by feeding it phantom power... my mackie mixer has global phantom so obviously if im using it with any condensers then there's a problem.

Can anyone help?
 
The standard reply is NO do not use phantom power with any ribbon mic. That is the safe answer.

But someone posted a reply in another thread that included the notion that it is a myth that phantom power will damage a ribbon.

Play it safe and dont do it. Get seperate preamps for one or the other and try not to rely on your Mackie board phantom and pre's to power and gain your mics. The Mackie pre's are not bad, but there are better pre's on the market.
 
Please go right ahead and reccommend some to me - I have a bit of cash to spare... one feature I'm particularly looking for is phase inversion for each channel, something else the mackie desk cant do :(
 
Bierman said:
Please go right ahead and reccommend some to me - I have a bit of cash to spare... one feature I'm particularly looking for is phase inversion for each channel, something else the mackie desk cant do :(
Click to expand...

one preamp that has plenty of gain for ribbons is the DAV BG-1. I also have a pair of M130/m160 here. The company is right in your backyard.

www.davelectronics.com/bg1.htm

World class pre. Designed for Decca records. Cheap, and HOOOOT output! plenty for those ribbons! I do location recording too man,(strictly, Classical Location recording) so cheers!

Teddy
 
cool yeah I'm doing allsorts, just recorded a choir on Thursday night at a very nice Christopher Wren church in London... there's a low quality mp3 of the reording on my (currentlly non-existent) website:



would love to know what you think.

but as well as classical I'll be getting into contemporary music, plus spoken word, just to keep things interesting!

anyone else got other reccommendations on mic preamps?
 
As long as everything is properly wired (and it should be), you only run the risk of damaging your ribbon mic if you're hotswapping it. If its plugged in, you should be able to engage and disengage the phantom power "with impunity", to quote my original source.
 
Bierman said:
I found your forum while trying to find out if I risk damaging my new Beyer Dynamic M160 by feeding it phantom power... my mackie mixer has global phantom so obviously if im using it with any condensers then there's a problem.

Can anyone help?
Click to expand...

Read this stuff, then make your own decision. It seems the safest and surest way not to damage any mic is not to use one.
http://www.hr-faq.org/phantom power and bias voltage.doc
http://recforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/m/41489/0
http://recforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/m/15701/0


I myself don't worry about it - just connect and disconnect them randomly.
 
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