Skip to main content

What's the best way to use good, balanced mics with Sony PCM-D50?

Your Avatar
Submitted by Stokestack on

Hi all.



This has probably been beaten to death, but I started wading through a couple of the stickies and gave up.



I bought a Sony PCM-D50 recorder because of its limiter (which works by recording at two levels simultaneously), thinking it would be handy for film & video (my primary uses). The problem is that it only has a crappy 1/8" stereo input. This input does have a switch for mic vs line usage.



What kind of level or impedance conversion do I need to do for real mics? I have a belt-mount phantom power supply with XLR in/out, so I was going to try simple XLR-to-RCA adapters and then into the 1/8" jack. Will this work? If not, what's your recommendation for the lowest-noise solution?



BTW, I had tried to rig up an XLR-to-1/8" setup for testing, and got an outrageous amount of noise. I figured it was bad wiring.



I'm primarily using a RODE shotgun, and I have a couple of AKG C3000s.



Thanks!



Gavin

Comments

Your Avatar
RemyRAD

That is correct. You cannot unbalance a balanced microphone when you are powering with phantom power. For that reason, you have to hook that microphone into a balanced input (a matching transformer). Then the secondary (the output of the transformer) can then be unbalanced into a 1/8 inch mono plug.



Go get'em

Mx. Remy Ann David

Fri, 09/23/2011 - 22:42 Permalink