Wiring a monitor as a kick mic.

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Uncle Dub
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Wiring a monitor as a kick mic.

Post by Uncle Dub » Tue Feb 15, 2005 10:16 am

So I have a couple of questions about this. Seems like lots of people are doing it. I tried it myself and was overcome, with the horrific noise levels.

I tried running unshielded twisted pair to the +ve and -ve terminals on the monitor, then connected it to the hot and cold on one of my mic channels. Being unshielded it picked up way to much noise. So;

1. Do I wire it up via the connectors with shielded wire and just leave the shield unhooked at the speaker end?
2. Should I bypass the crossover and make connections directly to the woofer?

I was thinking if I liked it, I had a spare woofer I could just mount in a box and put a male XLR on it so I can just hook it up like any other mic.

Anyone have opinions?

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Re: Wiring a monitor as a kick mic.

Post by earth tones » Tue Feb 15, 2005 10:50 am

If you use shielded wire, you solder the shield with the (-) cable lead to the (-) terminal on the speaker.

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Re: Wiring a monitor as a kick mic.

Post by earth tones » Tue Feb 15, 2005 10:52 am

I would bypass the crossover. The speaker will not pick up high frequencies anyways, due to the size of it's diaphram and the inability for the low energy of higher frequencies to vibrate it at higher revolutions per unit time..

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Re: Wiring a monitor as a kick mic.

Post by drumsound » Tue Feb 15, 2005 11:32 am

I wired a woofer to a 1/4" male and use a DI from there.

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Re: Wiring a monitor as a kick mic.

Post by psychicoctopus » Tue Feb 15, 2005 12:28 pm

drumsound wrote:I wired a woofer to a 1/4" male and use a DI from there.
wow, that's like 8 ohms into around 1,000,000 ohms. talk about an impedance difference. heck, if it sounds good.
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Uncle Dub
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Re: Wiring a monitor as a kick mic.

Post by Uncle Dub » Tue Feb 15, 2005 12:31 pm

cetanorak wrote:If you use shielded wire, you solder the shield with the (-) cable lead to the (-) terminal on the speaker.
Would you not be able to consider the woofer, like a capsule to be a balanced source?

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Re: Wiring a monitor as a kick mic.

Post by lars savage » Tue Feb 15, 2005 8:26 pm

I'd think you'd be OK if, as you suggested, you left shield lifted at the speaker but landed it at the console. As long as it sees ground at one end, the noise it intercepts will drain to ground and stay out of your signal. The only reason why shield is always landed at both ends in a mic cable is that condenser mics need ground to reference +/- 48v which is travelling on the pair... Bypassing the crossover would definitley be a good thing too, as the inductors in a typical passive crossover would probably pick up some noise in such a low level scenario. Anybody ever gotten this to sound good? I've been meaning to try it myself...

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