I went ahead and ordered some new pop filters for Jaime’s and my microphone.

As of right now, we’ve been using a small piece of motherboard shipping foam stretched over the mic head, and held in place with a rubber band. It works, but is probably not the most effective filter in the world. And I’m also a bit concerned that it is depositing small bits of foam on the microphones’ diaphragms.

Now, we already have some of the nylon-based pop filters. The problem, though, is that they are very heavy and very bulky. When installed, it is almost impossible to address the mic while reading or looking at a computer screen. They sound very good, they’re just too difficult to use.

So, these new pop filters should work out very well. They are these large foam creations made for another microphone, but they should fit our mics just fine. Here are the new pop filters.

I’ve read that foam pop filters / windscreens can cause problems with muffling the sound, but I don’t really think that applies to radio broadcast. The human voice isn’t very trebbly, and those are the frequencies that would be reduced. If anything, this filter will reduce harmonic overtones, and those overtones are likely inaudible at our broadcast bitrate anyway. I’m not too concerned.

So, by next show, our Ps should pop less and our SSSSes should be less harsh. That will allow me to further reduce the compression on our voices, and we should end up with a more-natural sounding program as a result.

We’ll see.

Mike

This entry was posted on Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 8:53 am and is filed under Equipment/Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.