Small room cement block walls

[Alan H. Chang]

You must have clients that are extremely easy to please if you can pass that off as acceptable.

More like people who are arrogant and ignorant of how their ears work, they never use them. Either they're easy and don't want to deal with this bull, knowledgeable enough to be dangerous, think they're better than you are, much lower self-esteem and egoistically challenging to social with, or experienced enough to not deal with something or somebody who does specifically what they do day in/out.

I start off with the most dumb-it-down consumer persuasion, then proceeds into reasons and whys. If I get more whys, I go into practicalities of what works. If more, acoustics. Then finally into physics with heavy amount of math.

 

[ROCKMORE]

A boundary layer mic, also called a PZM or Pressure Zone mic, is a different critter altogether from the usual omni,cardioid, hyper, etc, pickup pattern descriptions. It often resembles a hocky puck resting on a flat surfaced pressure plate such as a table top. When sound strikes a flat surface, a wave of high pressure air builds up running parallel to the surface. The mic responds to this pressure wave while effectively ignoring sound waves hitting it directly from above. The resulting pickup pattern resembles a hemispheric bubble resting on the pressure plate, in this case the table top. This has tha advantage of picking up voices around the table well while somewhat reducing response to room relfections since the reflected sound from the walls is so much weaker than the direct sound due to the much longer travel distance. The pressure buildup on the surface of the boundary plate adds about 6dB of effective gain to the basic mic capsule sensitivity for the direct sound but only about 3dB gain for the diffuse room sound, giving a more relaxed working distance from the speaker and further helping it dominate over the reflections coming off the walls. PZMs are frequently used for press conferences, round table discussiuons, teleconferencing, and when mounted at the stage lip or on positionable 4 to 8 foot square panels, in orchestral and stage drama recording. Two or three PZMs on the table top, controlled by an automixer that only pots up the mic closest to the speaker of the moment, would give you good coverage of the group seated around the table while minimizing the effects of the room reflections. Of course the other advice to get some sound absorbing materials into the room as much as is possible also still holds true.
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan07/articles/qa0107_2.htm
http://www.neal.co.uk/products/BoundaryLayerMic.htm
http://www.crownaudio.com/pdf/mics/136367.pdf

Great description of the mic and use. I'll look forward to experimenting with a few of those.

 

[dre83]

For a play (theatre) I used a few MKH50 mices and PZM places on the bottom of the floor... The actors didn't want to have wireless mices..

And...it was good actually...

But... it was good...because

- it was in a theatrical environment
- everybody was quiet
- it was more a "singing" rather then talking...
- theater actors speak a lot louder

So I don't think this would work in this case... Explained in short, when (as a human) you have a conversation in a
very loud place, you're still able to understand everything because the human ear can "select sounds". That's what's called "cocktail party effect".
A mice is stupid...and can not "select what it wants".