What Do I Need?

Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 5:28 am

Hi, I'm new and kind of need a bit of help. I have bought a condenser mic, "Behringer C-1" and new to this stuff and realised it needs phantom power and a xlr cable.

Basically the mic came with no cables, so what cables do I exactly need to connect it to my pc through soundcard?

PS: I asked somewhere else and they said a 6m jack plug and a jack adapater to a 3m one. But it's still confusing because it seems like I need a xlr to xlr cable to go into the input and another cable for output...

I have only days really to do this, thanks!

Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 9:55 am

You can't connect it directly to your soundcard. You need a pre-amp that will provide the 48V phantom power necessary for the microphone on an XLR connector. Then you would use a standard XLR-XLR cable.

However, since computer internal soundcards are generally not high quality, I suggest you consider a FireWire or USB interfaced pre-amp, by-passing your soundcard entirely. The M-Audio Mobile Pre USB or Firewire Solo interfaces are reasonable-quality low-cost units that would do the job, but there are a lot of similar units on the market.

Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 5:59 pm

Boswell wrote:

You can't connect it directly to your soundcard. You need a pre-amp that will provide the 48V phantom power necessary for the microphone on an XLR connector. Then you would use a standard XLR-XLR cable.

However, since computer internal soundcards are generally not high quality, I suggest you consider a FireWire or USB interfaced pre-amp, by-passing your soundcard entirely. The M-Audio Mobile Pre USB or Firewire Solo interfaces are reasonable-quality low-cost units that would do the job, but there are a lot of similar units on the market.

Let me expand on this because not all mics need phantom power.
the reason boswell mentioned it is because the Behringer C-1 dose.
Condenser microphones require voltage to maintain the bias voltage of the condenser. This is generally supplied in the form of phantom power from an outboard mic preamp or a mixing console, using the same lines as the balanced audio path.

The store that sold you the mic should have asked if you had a phantom power supply.
Soooo, now you need something like this
http://www.zzounds.com/item--ALEMULTIMIX8USB and you need a XLR cord from the mic to the mixer.
If you were looking to get away cheep you could have just bought this mic and pluged it right into your usb port.

http://www.samsontech.com/products/productpage.cfm?prodID=1810&brandID=2

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