Hello all,
With the idea of making some of my first outdoor recordings of rain,
ocean, rustling leaves, wind in the trees, and so on, I picked up an
Audio-Technica 4073a shotgun mic for my Sound Devices 702 recorder.
This my first shotgun mic. I chose it because of some favorable
comments I read online, reasonable price ($450 used), and low self-
noise (14 dB).
(http://www.audio-
technica.com/cms/wired_mics/69c1a91daefb7b3c/index.html).
But . . . it sounds terrible--it's echo-ey (reverberant), sibilant,
and very unclear. Outdoor or indoor dialog at 4 to 5 feet is muddy
and tubular. There's no way I would use use this dialog in a
production. And when I tried to record a breeze in some nearby pine
trees, it seemed more like white noise than anything I could
identify. I was hoping for "journey to a pristine mountain forest" ;-
). Is this unit defective? I can't believe a mic that is widely used
for film work could actually behave like this. I checked my settings,
low frequency roll-off and so on, everything seems correct.
What is your experience with the 4073a? Have you been able to
effectively capture nature sounds that were realistic without the
negative effects I mentioned? In any case, I'm trying to capture
these sounds to combine with some other audio material into a series
of meditation/relaxation CD's--the sound has to be great without any
element that would distract or annoy a listener.
If this 4073a is actually behaving normally, then I need another mic
for this work. Recommendations welcome!
(By the way, I don't mean to complain about Audio-Technica in
general. I own a number of their mics and they have been
excellent . . . until now.)
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