A Sound Triumph

When buying sound equipment to take to the field, I bought a digital sound recorder and a lav mic. The idea was to use the lav mic for interviews, plugging it into the recorder and clipping it to the interviewee. However, when I got the equipment and tested the lav mic with the recorder, it wouldn’t work. I went to the trusty internet in search of answers and read in a few different places that if I wanted to use an external mic, it had to have its own power source.

So, on the verge of leaving for India, I sent the lav mic back with the guarantee of at least getting my $20 back. I justified that the recorder itself would be enough by recording an interview with my nephew Connor (which is actually quite cute) and deciding that the quality was good enough.

However, once I got to India and started recording interviews and other events with the sound recorder, I realized how noisy India is! Everything is so close together, that from almost any room of any building you can hear people talking, dogs barking, or the always present cars honking. In addition to this, the concrete walls can make recording indoors very echoey at times. I don’t say any of this to put down India. Noise can actually be a beautiful thing at times; for instance, I love lying in bed in the mornings and listening to our next-door neighbor practice his Tibetan guitar. All I’m trying to say is that these noises can make it difficult when trying to record just one person talking.

So I decided that I did need some kind of lav or external mic after all. I did some more research online to find out what would work. I found a lot of the same things saying the mic needed an external power source. But then! A youtube video came to my rescue. Someone who had actually dug through the users manual had figured out that with all the right settings turned on, you can use an external mic without it’s own power.

I beat myself up for a while for sending the other one back, but then I set out to find something new. I could have ordered the same microphone again and had it delivered with $30 - $40 shipping and handling plus the risk of losing it in the mail, or I could look for something locally. I went to all the electronics shops I could find, but the closest thing anyone had to a lav mic was earphone/mic combinations designed for cell phones or computers. I found that none of the cell phone ones would work because of the low voltage they are designed to handle, but finally I found a set designed for computers that worked! Of course, it needed some modifications, but with Julia’s help, some tape, and a safety pin, we came up with this:

We wrapped the ear buds down around the wire and taped them down, and then put a safety pin up by the mic so it can be clipped to the interviewee. Pretty ghetto, but I tried it out in a real interview yesterday, and it worked great!

So a small triumph, but definitely very valuable to the quality of the film.

I’m considering just cutting the ear buds off because I don’t think it should effect the microphone… especially since each has its own plug at the end and I only use the mic plug. So let me know, anyone who knows about electronics if you think it would be fine just to clip off the ear buds. Thanks.