Home Assembled Parabolic Mike.

[Robert Hart]

For curiosity sake here's what an offset feed satellite TV dish and lapel mike can do. I don't know the cool trick to make the forum embed the clip frame in the message box so you'll have to copy and paste into your address bar or click the link which should take you to the clip.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY0M8dhcWwA

 

[Zach Love]

I wish there was an A/B test with that DIY parabolic & a standard shotgun mic. It does look really cool, but my understanding is that the lower frequency you're trying to record, the larger the dish you need.

So birds you could pick up with a small dish. But football players grunting & smashing into each other you need a dish much larger. Yay physics!

 

[Marc Wielage]

Parabolic mics have a very hollow, tinny, mid-rangey kind of sound and are not usable for dialogue for scripted films as a general rule. I've used them on football games in the days when they were trying to get just a moment of signal calls by the quarterback or the referee yelling, but most of that has been replaced by wireless mics these days. Parabolic mics have very, very weird EQ and have a lot of "phasey" kind of issues, too. They're a very specialized tool that I think does not often work for the traditional film, TV, and documentary business, but there are always exceptions where they can work.