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Good choice...nice sound quality, reliable, decent wind rejection. The US Prez uses an SM57 with a foamie on it. Thoughts? -Johntodd

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bouldersound Fri, 03/15/2013 - 00:15

Davedog, post: 402138 wrote: Notice there are always two mics on the podiums. One is out-of-phase with the other. No feedback

Only one is on at a time. The second one is a backup. They have at least two of anything critical.

If they they were both on and out of phase it would sound out of phase. If one had inverted polarity they would pick up almost nothing on axis.

Davedog Fri, 03/15/2013 - 22:54

This isnt quite the case. To begin the research look up Grateful Dead 'Wall Of Sound'. I have worked in studios where we would put the mic out of phase with the speakers' outputs in the control room to cancel the leakage into a live mic being used in front of them. There's a lot of interesting things that can happen when fooling with 'phase'.

bouldersound Sat, 03/16/2013 - 00:47

Davedog, post: 402173 wrote: This isnt quite the case. To begin the research look up Grateful Dead 'Wall Of Sound'. I have worked in studios where we would put the mic out of phase with the speakers' outputs in the control room to cancel the leakage into a live mic being used in front of them. There's a lot of interesting things that can happen when fooling with 'phase'.

For the Wall of Sound mics to work the singer had to sing right up close to one of the elements to create a differential signal. POTUS is too far from the mics for that to work.

KurtFoster Sat, 03/16/2013 - 04:07

in the studio scenario ... this was a trick that was invented by Cowboy Jack Clement. the idea was to place the mic and two monitors in an equilateral triangle with one monitor wired out of phase. he did this so the singers wouldn't have to wear cans.

playback was in mono so the mic would pick up the out of phase signals and it would cancel out yielding a vocal track clean of leakage.

bouldersound Sat, 03/16/2013 - 09:18

Kurt Foster, post: 402177 wrote: in the studio scenario ... this was a trick that was invented by Cowboy Jack Clement. the idea was to place the mic and two monitors in an equilateral triangle with one monitor wired out of phase. he did this so the singers wouldn't have to wear cans.

playback was in mono so the mic would pick up the out of phase signals and it would cancel out yielding a vocal track clean of leakage.

That's clever. The triangle wouldn't have to be equilateral but the mic would have to be equidistant. It wouldn't totally eliminate bleed for the same reason pan law is generally never set to -6.02dB: you don't get perfect summing in a room with speakers (so you wouldn't get perfect cancellation either). And the singer might have to stand off center to hear the speakers better.

This is another version of that trick Remy describes, doing a second pass on another track with just the monitors going and then mixing that in with the polarity inverted.

By the way, I find it helpful to distinguish between phase and polarity. Phase is in the time domain and polarity is in the amplitude domain. Phase can cancel frequencies selectively while polarity will cancel equally across the spectrum.

KurtFoster Mon, 03/18/2013 - 05:11

JohnTodd, post: 402179 wrote: Kurt; tell me all about that, I'd like to try it. I sing much better without cans on. Can look col on me but they hurt my - oh, IDK, they hurt something.

Any special tips for this technique?

as previously posted;

"trick" developed by Jack Clement for using speakers during the recording of vocals... first set up a mono mix for playback from the speakers.. small bookshelf type monitors are best for this technique. Flip the phase of one of the monitors, that is, run the red wire + to the black pole - on the speaker and the black or - wire to the red or positive + pole. Set the speakers four feet apart from each other and at exactly the same height as the mic will be. Place the mic, (in cardioid pattern) exactly four feet from both speakers forming a perfect equilateral triangle. Record..

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