Speaker 1: I'm switching out my interview microphone from a Shure SM58 to this Audio-Technica 8004L. I'm going to show you the differences and we're going to go through a switch through and we're going to do that next on Geekazine. Hey everybody, Jeffrey Powers here. Welcome to the show over at Geekazine. Think magazine, put in a geek, you've got Geekazine. Today, I'm getting ready to go to another show. I go out And, you know, I was at South by Southwest, I was at CES earlier this year. I'm heading out to the National Association of Broadcasters, or NAB, where we get to see all the cool video and audio gear that's coming out. And I wanted to kind of take at least time to do some upgrading of my camera rig. South by Southwest, I actually debuted the new cameras, which is my Sony PJ790 and the GoPro, which gets the overall shot. whereas this camera will get a close-in shot and go from there. So now it's time to upgrade some of the audio equipment. I've got shots where I can actually hook up lavaliers, and we can do one-on-one without microphones. But in this case, it's going to be more of a running gun situation, which is basically quick setup, quick interview, quick teardown. And in order to do that, you just basically have to have a handheld microphone. And I've been using this handheld system for a very long time. this is the sm58 because i've you know i'm a musician i have sm58s uh when i go out to play i use the sm58 beta which gives me a little bit more range but this is the sm58 this is what i've been using uh from interview to interview to interview and it does a great job but anyway i i wanted to do i wanted to have a microphone that was a little bit longer because especially if you put like the geekazine flag mic on this it like it's there's absolutely no room for uh for my hand and i need of course i need to hold it and that's that's an important thing so i ended up i did a lot of research i looked at road i looked at audio technica i looked at sure i ended up with this one it's the audio technica 8004l now you'll see the difference um so we have the cartridge which is the wireless cartridge right here i'm just going to put my hand on it and then right here is where the uh where the start of the microphone goes so if i take this other microphone in place side by side as you can see there is a big difference i mean we're talking you know i could put in the mic flag and i still have enough room to really get this microphone up to the other person but i also wanted something that i could hold like this and just do a slight turn back and forth and get uh get the interview that way as well in crowded noisy rooms so let's talk about this microphone the sm58 this is a musician's microphone if you go to see a band a lot of the times you're going to see a 58 in the front the lead singers on a 58 this uh this is an older 58 and i and they come with switches they come without switches they have a cardioid pattern they go 50 to 15 50 hertz to 15 000 kilohertz so if i got a really basic os it rolls off it might not be the best microphone for that but for standard voice like mine or yours this will work perfect and the other thing is it's it's got a very limited pattern so think of it like this I know never anybody asks about this you take a if you take a balloon blow it up a regular balloon and you just kind of stuff it right on top of the microphone that's usually the area where you need to be in to actually talk it's so the farther I get away the farther it's It's going to be harder here. But I also have on this, this is the Sony UW-1V6. This has what's called attenuation, which means if the background is super noisy and I start talking, it'll focus on my voice. And when I stop talking, it'll expand out to try and catch something audio-wise until I start talking again, then it brings it in. Right now, I have this at an attenuation of 0.9. So I'm going to turn this down. This is at an attenuation of 21. I don't know if you've noticed the difference, but it sounds a little softer and go from there. So let's bring it back. We've turned the attenuation completely off, which means I'm probably doing some sort of clipping because I didn't normalize for that. But as you can see, there's a big difference. So bring it back to nine. In a room like this, I like to have the attenuation at nine because you never know when a car passes by or somebody starts yelling out by the door or the doorbell rings or something like that. that but anyway uh so this is the microphone this is how it sounds we've got like i said 50 to 15 000 hertz which is a great range uh be able to catch male female voices especially female voices since the fact that they're a little bit softer than a male voice my voice is a little bit boisterous so you'll be able to catch this but if i if i hold it too close to my mouth and then hand it off to the other person you you definitely notice the difference in the volumes there its impedance is 150 ohms with 300 actual ohms its polarity is pressure diaphragm it's basically a dynamic microphone everything that a dynamic microphone goes from there and that's that's it comes in multiple versions one with this i i get them without the on off switches because they always seem to be problematic after a while you can get them with the uh with the with the switch and then of course the beta 58 which has a little bit more range to that as well but this is what i use for for interviews and this is uh this is how i have it mostly set up um like i said attenuation nine right now but for a conference such as ces i'll probably have that up to an 18 or even 21 just fully knocking it down from the background so what we're going to do is we're going to take a quick second here as I switch this out and I actually hook it up to the AT8004L and I'm going to show you and hopefully you'll hear the difference of this microphone right now. We're still on an attenuation of nine here. This is the AT8004L and once again I'm going to show you the difference. This is the 58. I'm going to show you the difference on the mic size. that's a big difference when you're when you've got another person standing that far away being able to just do that is a lot better with a longer mic and and like i said i could actually put it in the middle catch both of our voices by simply turning slightly to them as opposed to trying to stick it in their face because one thing that happens is if we're in an interview mode and I do this the first thing they do is this because they're having something come to their face so they'll step back and I always have to every now and then I have to stop them and say hey you know if the microphone is going to come to you but don't step back it's a very natural uh reaction when something comes towards you but uh just don't don't do that now I can have it a little bit farther away and they'll feel a little bit better on this now let's start with the attenuation we're at a nine for attenuation this is full attenuation at 21 as you can see it's a well it's bouncing around pretty good but let's let's switch it all the way to zero and this is an attenuation of zero so nothing the wireless is not doing anything to hold back on the sound or anything like that all right now we're back at nine attenuation of nine where I like to like I said if cars pass by or anything like that you probably will not hear it as I talk and go from there a little bit about this microphone it's a dynamic microphone once again it's an omnidirectional polar pattern once again take that balloon put it on top of the uh on top of the microphone it might be slightly bigger balloon in this case but if you're in that area it'll pick up the sound and go from there it's frequency response 80 hertz to 16 000 kilohertz which is better than the 50 to 15,000 so I'll be able to pick up a little bit more of voice with this microphone and of course with the extra length it'll be a lot easier to get closer to the source if needed. Its impedance is 300 ohms just like the 58 and the weight really not much heavier than the 58 itself so it's just got a longer handle to it so I'll be able to hold the microphone like this and i'll kind of feel like gene rayburn and the match game or something like that and that'll be kind of fun plus if i want to i can actually put the flag as you can see the flag could go up here i'd have tons of room to actually hold on to the microphone i could hold it like this and still have the mic flag up here of course i didn't put it on there each microphone does have a windscreen inside the grill so then when you put another windscreen out so technically you have two windscreens on it but this also has the grill it also has the windscreen but it also has an enclosed back end which means if I talk over here like here or something like that it's a big difference than if I'm talking here so if you you can actually get a lot of lose a lot of ground noise from there anything up you got it and like I said as long as you're pointing towards the subject even a little bit so if i'm out here and the person's like let's say right here and i just do that then you can actually hear both our voices and i don't have to shove a microphone into that person's face and go from there these are both xlr microphones so they can also hook up to a mixing board or you get one of those uh usb adapters and you can use this uh hook it up to your ipad iphone you can do that as well have a lot of back and forth conversation with that so basically these are the two microphones that i used for interviews the sm58 which is a great microphone i i have no problems with this microphone except for the fact of the length which microphone do you use do you use the sm58 do you use the at8004l are you a podcaster and use the audio this is the popular and the audio technica um atr 2100 in fact let's do this really quick let's just let's just hook this up and see what how this sounds hold on a second i have not done this this is the atr 2100 on my uwp 6v1 this is the uh the cardioid dynamic usb xlr so you can actually hook up a usb uh hook up to this but in this case uh the capsule is so big that i wouldn't unless i had some sort of alternate way to hook it up i could so once again at this attenuation of nine let's bring it up to 21 this is at the full attenuation of 21 now let's bring it down to zero and of course we have just the open ended uh open ended sound right here bring it back to nine and of course this has an on off switch and i don't know if the xlr works on let's let's do that let's turn it off and turn it back on another problem with this is if you're if you're doing an interview accidentally flip that switch you lose a lot of audio and you don't know about it uh until you come back now let's take a look at the uh the information on this one i think this is uh also a 50 yeah 50 to 15 000 hertz uh audio response cardioid pattern dynamic microphone uh in the usb version it's 16 bit of course we're doing xlr analog audio so it doesn't really matter on that um and uh pretty much everything else it's about what's against the same weight as the sm58 same weight as the 8004l um but you also have the interview uh be able to interview so if i'm doing an interview like this and i have the person over here and i'm talking it's harder to hear but it comes back to me of course you can hear it better and go from there so all right i i didn't expect to do this one but i think it's very important to have this into the mix so these are the three microphones i'm going to be giving this one a try the audio technica at 8004l when i'm out at nab national association of broadcasters watch the videos over at geekazine youtube.com forward slash geekazine but these are the microphones and let's just do a size comparison really quick this is the sm58 so you have a little bit more handle space on the ATR but when it comes to the 8004 it's it's basically the winner when it comes to length so that's it thanks a lot for watching hopefully this is very helpful helpful to you when you when you set up your microphone whether it's in a studio whether it's doing interviews using using whatever microphone you have hopefully this will help you with the sound jeffrey powers with geekazine think magazine put into geek twitter me at geekazine geekazine at gmail.com and of course go over to youtube.com forward slash geekazine until next time you guys geek out and take care