2018-05-21 09:29:42

okay, i bought soundman, i doupt that i will see them in the next week smile

2018-05-21 10:20:11

Hmm, when you buy them from Thomann, I guess they will ship quite quickly. I have ordered from them countless times and they usually come from Germany to Estonia within a week. So, as Poland is much closer, they should arrive much sooner.

2018-05-21 10:25:31

the good think is that that i can just send product back if i'll see that it doesn't satysfiet me, and they write that they give back all money,, also money for courier so it's really cool.

2018-05-21 12:08:22

A couple of points to help you getting started when you receive the microphones.
The mikes have two sides, the one which has a kind of more pronounced edge goes outside and the other one into your ear. The left and right microphone look identical, but this problem can be easily solved by a bit of tape wrapped around the wire.
This may not make sense right now, but when you have them in your hands, hopefully the thing I wrote becomes clearer.

2018-05-21 12:23:34

and where are the mics modules exactly? From the ear hole side, or from outside? Logically thinking it should be from ear hole side.

2018-05-21 17:25:07

They are facing outside, or at least that's where they are supposed to be.

2018-05-22 10:32:12

Or meybe do you know how resistant this microphone is to overdrive? I mean is it easy to overdrive when loud sounds? For example, in my opinion mics in olympus is easy to ovedrive and it is difficult to set good recording volume level.

2018-05-22 10:45:07

Yes, they are quite loud, so you definitely need the lower gain settings.

2018-05-23 10:03:07

The package has been sent! On ups site they wrote that probably it will be on friday! So i just have to be patient and wait! smile

2018-05-23 10:19:12 (edited by flackers 2018-05-23 10:20:20)

I ordered the sound professionals on Saturday, and it shipped yesterday, so we'll see how much longer it takes to get here. I paid $26 for the first class international, and it'll have to clear customs which usually takes a couple of days, something that wouldn't be the case if I'd bought from Thomann in Germany as the tax would already have been paid. At the moment it's just left the main distribution center in New Jersey. I'm guessing next stop is the airport, and my next update will be when it arrives in Britain.

2018-05-23 14:35:55

in your opinion, soundprofessionals are better than soundmans, or why did you buy soundprofessionals?

2018-05-23 20:26:28 (edited by flackers 2018-05-23 20:36:52)

I ordered the sound professionals before ruler of dark forces put up his sample. All the samples I've heard, including the Ohrwurm 3D have all sounded good. I might have ordered the Ohrwurm ones if I could have found an English description of them. I have a high regard for German manufacturing, but I don't understand enough german to navigate the site and read the description. I ordered the sound professionals just because they had a better description on the website than the soundmans did on Thomann. That's my one big gripe about Thomann: they have really skimpy descriptions of things. I was just on the sound professionals site and thought screw it I'll just get these ones. It probably would have been smarter to get the soundmans actually, but it's done now. Looking forward to playing around with them. Been out on the tandem bike today in the glorious sunshine we're having in Britain for a change, and I thought I'll have to make a recording of this to see how it sounds.

2018-05-23 22:42:28

flackers wrote:

I ordered the sound professionals before ruler of dark forces put up his sample. All the samples I've heard, including the Ohrwurm 3D have all sounded good. I might have ordered the Ohrwurm ones if I could have found an English description of them. I have a high regard for German manufacturing, but I don't understand enough german to navigate the site and read the description. I ordered the sound professionals just because they had a better description on the website than the soundmans did on Thomann. That's my one big gripe about Thomann: they have really skimpy descriptions of things. I was just on the sound professionals site and thought screw it I'll just get these ones. It probably would have been smarter to get the soundmans actually, but it's done now. Looking forward to playing around with them. Been out on the tandem bike today in the glorious sunshine we're having in Britain for a change, and I thought I'll have to make a recording of this to see how it sounds.

I hope you have windscreens if you're planning to do a bike ride recording? These mics are extremely sensitive to wind, just a fair warning.

2018-05-23 23:02:42

Thanks, you're right it might be a bit noisy on the bike. I ordered a couple of pairs of windscreens, but whether they'll be enough is another matter. We do tend to mostly ride coastal paths where it's even windier than normal.

2018-05-23 23:43:15

Well, do upload and share, I think the windscreens will do the job, I personally use furry windscreens, gives so much more protection than the foam ones, at least in my opinion.

2018-05-24 08:47:11

oh my good, windscreens to soundmans are for 100 euro, it is almost cost of microphones, meybe i'll find another

2018-05-26 02:32:16

okay, i have it. What i see? It is in my opinion easy to overdrive them, when i don't use automatic gain control, during closing the door or when i am speaking. I don't know, meybe it's problem with my recorder, not with this mics, i have to test it on another recorders.

2018-06-01 11:33:42 (edited by flackers 2018-06-01 11:36:40)

My mic arrived yesterday. So it took just under two weeks from the US to the UK, and the shipping cost was $26: pretty good going. The mic is the Sound Professionals MS-TFB-2, and the recorder is the zoom H4N. Thanks to Donavin for the recommendation. I'm pretty impressed with the zoom. The on-board microphones are better than I thought they'd be, and it's pretty easy to use as a blind person. Though you can screw up in the menus and end up in a different mode and then nothing plays or records and you think it's broken, as happened to me. And I think putting the socket for the external mic on the underside was such a stupid design. Either that or they want you to buy the farty little desktop tripod thing. And you have to buy your own adapter, that always pisses me off with electronics. And this is a real battery hog too. But it's a good recorder, and I'm looking forward to trying out the multi-track mode which I haven't done yet. I really like the fact you can just take out the SD card, put it into your PC and manage the files from there, even though deleting them on the device is easy enough. Haven't been out on the bike yet, but even with the foam windscreens, I think there'll be some noise. I made a recording walking home last night with a long cane. It's about 25 minutes long through some fairly quiet suburban streets at around 10pm, but I think the subtle sounds are interesting too, and it shows you can walk around perfectly safely with the mics in your ears. I was really surprised that you even get the sense of obstacles in the way as the reverberant sound thickens. I had the same issues as papierek getting the recording level down. I've turned it down tons and there's still a little bit of clipping here and there with the loudest noises. I found particularly percussive sounds such as doors closing are the worst. Anyway here's my clip.
http://anyaudio.net/listen?audio=2kWJy2DSSaxe

2018-06-01 12:45:12

I would not recommend auto gain, ever, to be honest, though on the H1 I have, its not too bad. Remember that you can record low and normalize up. Actually I would recommend doing that with the H1 if anyone has it, because there will be noise in it otherwise, and if you normalize it, you will hear the noise quite nastily, once that's done, moving forward, you can't do anything, compressing it or using a downward expander doesn't work, compressing something with high noise is bad because when you apply makeup gain or amplify it yourself, you're basically making the noise more audible since you're squashing the dynamic range an then applying gain to it to compensate for the loss. SO really just making a problem worse. I mean I guess auto gain might be OK for a walk or something, I hate the effect though, the constant up and down and up and down annoys the crap outta me. You definitely want to record somewhere in the vicinity like you'll get the dynamic range of the audio, quieter stuff won't fall off, etc. Another problem with autogain is its generally not quick enough to knock down the initial peak of a loud noise, then you have to compress and normalize, I usually do it the other way around though, normalize and then compress even though that seems kind of backwards, but keep in mind I record low usually, and normalization goes off of the loudest peak in the file, so if my loudest peak isn't that loud, it still has room to normalize around 0dBfs.

One thing I'm not real great with is thinking through the order of which effects should be applied, I have a problem with switching stuff in my head like reversing stuff, like a route from somewhere to somewhere, you'd think it would be easy to flip that and go back the way you came but not for me. I think its some sort of disorder, but who knows. I also think I have a problem where my corpus callosum isn't developed properly, but that's just guess work, but several things factor into that guess. SO sometimes I do things in the wrong order, its easier to memorize rather than try to think it though.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2018-06-01 13:00:36

Oh shit, I don't even know if auto rec level is on or off. I'll have to have someone check that.

2018-06-01 13:05:53

Ah, if you have ambient sounds and nothing too loud, it should be alright.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2018-06-01 15:17:38

That was a nice recording, @Flackers, I would suggest setting a gain of around 50, or maybe 40 for louder sounds, if you want to record louder sounds though I would recommend a gain of around 30 or so. And yes normalization does bring a lot of noise, especially if it's a quiet recording. And there is a little switch at the back at the unit that you can turn on, it's called stamina mode, and it extends the recorders battery life up to 11 hours, the drawback is that you can record in wav 44.1khz in 16 bit only.

2018-06-01 16:19:24 (edited by flackers 2018-06-01 20:32:59)

I'll give the stamina mode a try, 16bit wav would be fine for me. The only thing I'm not sure about is using the zoom as an interface. It talks about plugging guitars and basses in, but there's no mention of a HiZ input. All the interfaces I've used have had some kind of HiZ switch that boosts the signal for direct input of electric guitars.

2018-06-01 16:37:12

@Flackers, yeah, not too sure about guitars and that, but the stamina mode is great, but you can't use the multi track features then.

2018-06-01 16:56:23

That's okay, I'd only ever use the mtr mode at home anyway.