What's the best mic under $3.50?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Treeline
  • Start date Start date
Treeline said:
Sorry.

It's been a long day. Carry on.

:eek: :D
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The Campbells Large Diaghragm Mushroom Soup Can attached to 20 gauge nylon string.
 
billisa said:
The Campbells Large Diaghragm Mushroom Soup Can attached to 20 gauge nylon string.
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Yeah, but what I want to know is, how does it compare to a Neumman U87? Has anybody thought about doing a shoot-out between the two?

Brad
 
2nd-hand Mr Microphone? DJL always did say it sounded as good as a Studio Projects B1 ... or was it the other way around .... :eek:
 
they got em at the dollar store. mics that sound as good as a dollar or slightly more.
 
Personally, I still like the Cambell's soup can idea. Plus, you could mod it very easily. I mean, what would happen if you used a 16 or 12 gauge wire, instead of a 20?

But of course, what would REALLY rock is if you could find an old soup can from the 50's or 60's. The heavier gauge metal would dampen the vibrations more, giving you a much mellower, vintage tone. I'm sure it would be MUCH superior to modern soup cans. ;)

Bassman
 
Bassman Brad said:
Personally, I still like the Cambell's soup can idea. Plus, you could mod it very easily. I mean, what would happen if you used a 16 or 12 gauge wire, instead of a 20?

But of course, what would REALLY rock is if you could find an old soup can from the 50's or 60's. The heavier gauge metal would dampen the vibrations more, giving you a much mellower, vintage tone. I'm sure it would be MUCH superior to modern soup cans. ;)

Bassman
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LOL...I wonder if there is any mods that would make it sound like a U47.....maybe a tube with an LED to light it?? :D
 
Bassman Brad said:
Personally, I still like the Cambell's soup can idea. Plus, you could mod it very easily. I mean, what would happen if you used a 16 or 12 gauge wire, instead of a 20?

But of course, what would REALLY rock is if you could find an old soup can from the 50's or 60's. The heavier gauge metal would dampen the vibrations more, giving you a much mellower, vintage tone. I'm sure it would be MUCH superior to modern soup cans. ;)

Bassman
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Yeah. Some of them are sputtered with iron oxide. Just like gold except made for the common man. Woman. Commonmanwoman. Commowomanan. Jeez. Made for the rest of us. There.

And some aren't sputtered with anything but sure seem to be splattered with all kinds of stuff. And they smell bad. Those are believed to have been used primarily for ambient micing, or "micing with ambience."

There are also Campbell shotgun mics, but it's more common to find vintage Schlitz shotgun mics. Well, not really. The ones that survived long enough to get buried behind the fence were more likely .22 mics. Think of them as small diaphragm units. The shotgun Campbells rarely survived long, although they say that one could not truly destroy a Schlitz beer can unless you mixed in a little Black Label first before shooting at it. But you had to run away quickly before the peculiar aroma of the Black Label made you hurl breakfast.

Black Label cans were not effective as mics. It was deemed more efficient and studly to use them as automotive body patching. The practice was to bite off the top of the can and then rip it apart with your bare hands in front of a buxom teenybopper. You would then have one friend (nicknamed "Shiv") pop rivet the can (label out) over a rust hole in the fender of your green Mercury with the magenta flames on the side. Another ("Needles") would stitch up your hand without using anaesthesia while you held the girl's gaze in an unrelenting manner (to the extent you retained an ability to focus). That exercise tended to separate the locally available female population into those who immediately got sick and those who immediately became more interesting because they did not get sick. But I digress.

What I'd like to see more of is a true appreciation of the large industrial tomato can mics of our childhood. These were very large diameter mics that could be set up in arrays of troubling dimensions and of questionable purpose. They became commonly used in connection with the early school lunch programs and the subsequent afternoon activity programs with Mrs. Beagle, the art teacher, but really reached their peak in popularity during the Civil Defense scares of the 1960s, when they were stacked on top of children's school desks for greater radiation protection as the kid crouched underneath. They allowed for mass communication, but had a difficult entry to the wider communications market because filled cans would occasionally slide off some of the desks and knock a kid unconscious.

Later experiments with radiation exposure and the handy home geiger counter owned by every American parent in the late '60s and kept in its white and blue box on the side of the shelf at the top of the cellar stairs while the yellow Ray-O-Vac D-cells inside rotted away to a brown drippy mush, suggested that the contents of these cans, following exposure to radiation, would on occasion become radioactive themselves. This led to questions concerning the wisdom of actually opening the cans and consuming their contents, or at least, of informing those about to do so of the issue. As a result the larger empty cans eventually fell into disuse. That's what the Government tells us.

I just think vintage gear is so special, don't you? What a wonderful thread. I think I might just go out and hit my thumb with a hammer now. :cool:
 
MichaelJoly said:
Panasonic WM-61a electret condenser capsule = $1.83ea.
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That's a little pricy. Do you know any decent capsules for under $0.34? Some of us are on a budget, you know.
 
i take about 2 capsules a day to make sure i keep my health up.... i think they cost about 3 cents each... should do what we want... they make for really strong tracks!
 
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