Primo Microphones

Peter C.

Peter C.

Veteran
I was recently looking into adding another lav mic to my legal deposition work and I ran across Primo mics. There's a company in England who has built lavs housing for them, called the Clippy. They're large so can be only used where you don't care about the size. They seem used mostly for ambient recording because of their low signal to noise but sound great on voices. Anyone ever heard of them? I've read some complaints of EMI and radio wave rejections. Not sure if its because of the capsule or the wire. They now use Mogami cable...


 
Yes, I have bought many of the Primo bare capsules and the Clippy mics from them (i.e. Micbooster): Nick Roast is an excellent chap (ex-BBC sound recordist), and responds to technical queries really helpfully. The RFI problem came with the EM272 capsules themselves, which replaced the Primo EM172: Nick had a warning about this on his website, but I can't find this today and, at the back of my mind, I think the capsule design was modified to solve it. Just email him to clarify. And, yes, they do sound good and it's great, if size isn't critical, to have a lav mic with decent self-noise (i.e. 14dBA).
Cheers,
Roland
 
Just wondering, how come these and not one of the other usual popular mid-tier choices people look at? They sound noticeably better?
 
I have a specific purpose legal depositions. The main attributes I'm looking besides sound quality is durability, a long cable and good shielding.

Many corporate locations in the city have strong EMI/RFI thus the need for good shielding. I've been having an issues with this recently but I made recent discovery that adapter that reduces phantom voltage to plugin power is susceptible to EMI. The Clippy looks like it has the reducer inside the xlr jack but I'm not sure.

A long cable is needed because the mic instead of going into a body pack needs to routed under the table to keep out of their feet and wheels of the chair.

The cable and wire need to be strong because people often forget to take off their mic and yank them hard. Most of the higher end lav mics have short thin cables and the capsule is molded. If the cable connection gets damaged there's no way to repair it. The Clippy looks like you have full access to capsule enclosure.

Size doesn't matter because only one person is being filmed and the mic is visible. The other alternative is Sony EMC-77 or EMC-55. Both have every thing I need but there are 3 cons, the cable in not replaceable, the phantom power adapter is big and permanently attached, and they're expensive.
 
I was going to say...the ECMs were the go-tos for this stuff for a while, at least from the little I saw.

I'm not sure if you're saying you need phantom power or don't and where exactly the cable would be going, but all of the B versions of those Sony mics work off AA batteries as well and any XLRs going under a table could probably go straight into the camera at that point.
 
A depo is 3-5 people at a conference table. I run a snake from an audio mixer to a center point then from there run wired lav mics to each person. The mixer provides phantom power but an adapter needs to step down the voltage for each mic, if adapter is near a power source such as laptop power supply it can create a loud hum.

This shows the Sony ECM-77 with the adapter which is permanently attached.

The Clippy has no such adapter it's terminated in a standard XLR which makes it easy to setup, store, repair, smaller footprint and considerably cheaper.
 
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J/W, why do adapters need to be involved for stepping down voltage? Is the bulky part of every wired XLR lav where the pins are an adapter that steps down voltage?

Because come to think of it I haven't seen or used too many wired XLR lavs and never thought of it. (Mostly wireless kits.)

The few times I personally used ECMs they were going into a Zoom F6 and there were no issues...phase cancellation on the other hand though. :cry:
 
Many mics like the Sony ECM series lavalieres operate on 'Plug-in Power' (aka, bias current). The ones with an XLR connector usally have a Phantom Power voltage step-down transformer in the XLR connector module. 'Plug-in Power' (aka, bias voltage) is nominally around 5 volts. many Electret condenser mics operate on 'Plug-in Power' or 9-52 volts Phantom power depending on the connector type. Plug-in power and Phantom Pwr are not interchangeable and true condenser mics usually require nominal 48 volts Phantom Pwr to operate efficiently.
 
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