I work as a photographer/videographer in a marketing design team for a Dutch business intelligence company. Part of my work is doing and styling video interviews for marketing use. When I'm out doing these interviews on external locations I use a very basic rig:
- Panasonic GH2 HDSLR
- Panasonic 14-140mm f4 and a Leica 20mm f1.7
- Zoom H1 field recorder
- Brainwavz M2 (To monitor input, I found these to be sensitive enough to let me know when there's too much hiss.)
- Olympus ATR-3350 active lavalier microphone
- Gorillapod SLR Zoom
Light, versatile, cheap to replace, transportable in a single Kata backpack and capable of excellent results, hitting high above the whole rig's modest MSRP.
Why am I writing this in Head-Fi's portable headphone amp section you ask? Well, lately I seem to keep running into people that have a tendency to talk almost inaudibly. So soft you could mistake the sound coming out of their mouths for dead silence. That soft. Since my rig's sensitivity goes only so far I had to find a way to increase input volume without introducing more hiss and preferably without buying a more expensive microphone. If I manually increase volume in post production the audio becomes easily distorted and hiss becomes unbearable.
Enter the Headstage Arrow! Pictured below in it's temporary case, with stickers to label the switches. :)
(I still haven't received the final case, but that's a different story...)
Turns out the Headstage Arrow is a perfect microphone amp. It allows me to cleanly amplify the ATR-3350's audio and it's impedance settings allow me to further smoothen the input. I can get ear-shattering audio to capture even the most inaudible whisper. Without distortion!
Now I know it kind of defeats the purpose to use a $300 headphone amplifier on a $30 microphone but hey, I had the Arrow laying around and it works! I guess you could use a Fiio E6 with similar results, making my whole story a bit more interesting. ;)
Edited by Negakinu - 11/24/11 at 1:42am
