Mic Question

[George L.]

Hello everyone,

I am wondering...If you have an electet mike and press it against your rib cage, and wispered very softly, do you thing the mike could pick up a VERY quiet wisper??? Pretend there is an quad amp circuit to amplify the signal.

Thanks,

George L.

 

[dknguyen]

Isn't that how throat-speaking machines work except that the throat? I think the ribcage vibrations are far too low to do that, especially if you are whispering. When I speak the vibrations in the rib cage are much weaker than on my throat, and that's when I am speaking normally.

 

[Russlk]

When whispering, the sound is all in the mouth, so even a throat mike will not pick that up.

 

[audioguru]

Throat mics sound horrible! Like the tie-clip mics worn by TV news readers, they pickup only vowels because they are too far away from the mouth. A ribcage mic would sound worse.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

A good few years ago I used to make custom leads for a local business man, he was selling special earpieces from Australia for use with PMR (Private Mobile Radio), and even had the SAS come to test them!.

The earpiece acted as both speaker and microphone, and as a microphone it used sound conducted through the bones of the skull - the quality was reasonably good, certainly plenty good enough for it's uses.

The SAS were interested for parachute drops, where it leaves them completely free but able to communicate (the PTT could be mounted in the hand, or anywhere convenient to press).

 

[Dr.EM]

I think you'll find if you press a microphone against your chest, you'll hear a lot of heartbeating sound. A highpass filter might help, but as pointed out, its mostly going to be lower frequencies there anyway. The only thing that has a chance of hearing any very quiet sounds without being drowned out with noise is high quality studio mics and instrumentation mics. I use electret capsules, and have some of what are regarded as about the best (WM-61A), but even they had a lot of noise recording something as quiet as a clock ticking. The noise is caused by the internal FET, and changing that is virtually impossible.

I'm always quite suprised how good those tie clip mics sound, when looking at thier location, but I can definately hear the sibilances and its quite clear. Mabye they have an ambient mic around too? Probably loads of compression and EQ on the signal anyway for broadcast.

 

[audioguru]

I'm always quite suprised how good those tie clip mics sound, when looking at thier location, but I can definately hear the sibilances and its quite clear.

The compressor says, "Too loud! Turn the level way down!" Then good-bye sibilants. The high audio frequencies are muffled by the clothing anyway. The most important thing about TV voices is to hide the microphone.

 

[Hero999]

Sometimes throat mics are used in conjunction with normal mics and digital sound processing to remove background noise from the recording.

 

[audioguru]

Background noise was a deadly sin in old movies and old TV shows. So they used a noise-gate circuit to remove the noise. Unfortunately it also removed a lot of the first sounds of words.

 

[Dr.EM]

I've always found distortion to be a bigger issue on older films. They had a tendancy to use very loud blary brass on a lot of old film soundtracks too, and that kind of instrumentation sounds terrible with distortion, which the recordings had in abundance. I can't help feel that if they had recorded the sound under the limit, at the sacrifice of having more hiss, we would have a better chance of restoring it to a listenable state today than the dreadfully distorted state it was actually released with. Very old film, pre 1935 or so, tends to have both hiss and distortion.

Also, i'm not sure why, but film sound recordings made in the 50s and before sound a particular way and thats ok, its not good but I don't have too much issue with it. But there is a certain sound to recordings in the late 60s early 70s on a lot of films that really gets to me in a way I can't define. It sort of makes me fall asleep! I find them very hard to concentrate on.