I collect old microphones and I came across this interesting stereo mic on a collector’s website. It is designed to give accurate stereo recordings by making the mic into the form of a human head with realistically shaped ears for the receiving sections.
Of course, it is a dumb idea, but beautifully implemented
“The KU 100 is a human head replica with microphones inside of the ears. It is used for binaural pick-up to create the most realistic stereo recordings. This third-generation design is loudspeaker compatible, and accurately reproduces ambient acoustics with information about distance, direction, and perspective. It offers exceptional speech intelligibility in noisy environments. Applications for the KU 100 include radio drama, special effects for film, outdoor nature recordings, acoustic evaluation, and scientific research. The KU 100 package includes the head, IC 5 (10 meter) extension cable, AC 20 adapter cable, internal battery supply, external AC power supply unit and aluminum carrying case. The microphone can be powered by external phantom power or by an internal battery supply. Thus, remote location recording is possible with only a minimum of extra accessories.”
8 Comments
Why is it a dumb idea?
Can a lump of plastic positioned between two microphones help in the quality of sound recording? I think not. It looks cool, but it is a gimmick that does nothing special.
Two microphones on stands about 6 inches apart would do as well. The quality of the mics is what matters.
Keith
Quality? No engineer claims that it helps with quality, the whole mechanism is to simulate how sound is shaped. Maybe you can’t hear the difference, but the physics is not disputable. The head is a housing for the ears which have the mics inside the canals (open mics and mics inside canals sound drastically different to my ears). The solid head protects the recording from superfluous crossfeed.
These heads are used for binaural recordings. check out binaural sounds on youtube. They are great! You will know why it is very far from a dumb idea and that binaural recordings/holographic recordings also were the main competitor for surround sound with just 2 speakers! :) If you don’t want it you can give it to me ;)
Why is the head any better then just using two microphones? I don’t buy that that the head or the shape of the ears makes a difference.
Just place two cardioid mics facing in opposite directions about 8 inches apart. Vary the distance between the mics to get different degrees of sound separation, depending on how close or far you want the sound to appear to the listener. With the head, you have to place the microphone at the distance that you want the listener to hear. A head ten feet from a sound source will seem like 10 feet, but there is no way to adjust when that would be impossible to do.
Keith
hey keith, the reason being the reflections and the way the sound enters your ear canal. as humans we have subconsciously trained our ears for millions of years to understand how the sound differs when coming from different angles. The ear canal and the shape of your ears, the reflection of your shoulders even and the distance of the ears, plus the mass between them make up a more complex system than one would think. Also your ears compensate. If you put a tube infront of your ear it will sound “unusual” right? Well really we have 2 “microphones” inside tubes in our head. The sound isn’t phasey though is it. Our ears/brains compensate for this. In the case of the Neumann Head, Neumann have compensated this. This is the key to getting a stereo sound to sound 3D! Listen to these examples with headphones:
· http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzFswCpJPqg
· http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3MvVPgLJWc
The problem is that it hardly works with speakers. Only with headphones. Without headphones I still feel that the stereowidth is drastically improved to any mic technique that I know of. And also sometimes the effects still work like on michael jacksons black and white(the door slamming).
if you can achieve the effect with just 2 mics then pleas let me know how :)
take care!
uuh I have to correct myself, obviously not millions of years…more like 150-200.000 ;P