joulupukki
Well-known member
After purchasing a stereo pair of MP SDC-84 mics, I wanted to dive deeper and try my hand at sourcing all the parts to see if I could build some DIY mics that performed as well as the MP mics.
I bought some circuit boards from Graeme Woller, used some inexpensive Takstar CM-60 mics as donor bodies, 3U cardioid capsules, and 3U GZT-84 transformers. The project has turned out extremely well so far and, for the type of acoustic instruments I'm recording, I have the mics sounding virtually identical.
But, there's one big difference in performance and that's the resilience to cell phone RFI. The MP mics are definitely susceptible to it, but these DIY mics are at least 10 times more susceptible. I've tried re-routing the wires on the transformer and to a small degree different routings have helped some.
Here's a couple of pictures of the mics (the top is one of the MP mics). On the middle one I shortened the transformer leads to see if it'd help (didn't seem to). On the bottom one I twisted some of the transformer leads without shortening. That maybe helped marginally.
At this point, I'm wondering if the main difference is the board layout in the DIY? Or would there be something else I should consider that I haven't thought of yet?
I bought some circuit boards from Graeme Woller, used some inexpensive Takstar CM-60 mics as donor bodies, 3U cardioid capsules, and 3U GZT-84 transformers. The project has turned out extremely well so far and, for the type of acoustic instruments I'm recording, I have the mics sounding virtually identical.
But, there's one big difference in performance and that's the resilience to cell phone RFI. The MP mics are definitely susceptible to it, but these DIY mics are at least 10 times more susceptible. I've tried re-routing the wires on the transformer and to a small degree different routings have helped some.
Here's a couple of pictures of the mics (the top is one of the MP mics). On the middle one I shortened the transformer leads to see if it'd help (didn't seem to). On the bottom one I twisted some of the transformer leads without shortening. That maybe helped marginally.
At this point, I'm wondering if the main difference is the board layout in the DIY? Or would there be something else I should consider that I haven't thought of yet?