Finally a great mic for wildlife shooting

[Lauri Kettunen]

Finally got a microphone I need and really like. Bought a very sensitive stereo mic from www.telinga.com. It can be used with or without a parabola. In both cases great sound and very low noise. Even better, the parabola does not create that typical parabola sound but instead is a combination of "target" and surround stereo sound. It has nice wind shields, is light to carry and the parabola can be rolled and packed in a reasonable small volume. Even not that expensive but instead very much like Red; great product with reasonable cost. Works nice with Red one. (I have a Sounddevice preamplifier and insert a line signal.)

[Steve Gibby]

Nice find Lauri. I shoot a lot of nature/wildlife, so I'm going to check this out.

[jbeale]

There is a Yahoo groups forum dedicated to audio recording of nature:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/naturerecordists/

Lots of discussion of mics, amps, and recording devices with the highest sensitivity and lowest possible noise level, and various qualities needed for field use. Lots of experienced recordists there. I believe the Telinga mic has been a standard for birding and wildlife for quite a while.

[Sanjin Jukic]

Nice but is not for a hand-held one-man in a jungle (real or concrete) sort of shooting that I'm mostly interested in.

My Rode NTG-3 can serve me well.

More tests coming soon.

Stay tuned.

[Steve Gibby]

Thanks for that URL jbeale. Some very good info there

Yes Sanjin, that parabolic mic is too big and overkill for highly-mobile wildlife production by a single camera operator, but when the crew is large enough to have a dedicated sound guy, and the production budget is large enough to demand a very high quality sound recording, then those mics are great.

[Meryem Ersoz]

of course, there's always this...

http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/sound/wildsounds/wildlife.html

Lauri, have you tried pairing the parabola with any of the mics you already own? (looks as if this is an option from the website). Anything to report?

[michael zaletel]

What's the USD price of this mic?

-shooter

[Pawel Achtel]

I went through the whitepapers and I am still not sure what microphone(s) I should get for my next shoot. I will be filming seals from ~10m away. Would I be better of with something like MKH-70 shotgun or a Telinga parabolic mic? I can use a boom pole, no problem. At what point a Telinga microphone will produce better results than a long, good quality shotgun?

Shooter, the prices are listed on their website.

[Lauri Kettunen]

Lauri, have you tried pairing the parabola with any of the mics you already own? (looks as if this is an option from the website). Anything to report?


All I can say is that my first impression is this mic seems to be the best one I've ever used with or without the parabola. The whole point is that one can use the mic without the parabola as well and this is just so convenient when working alone. I haven't tried other mics on the parabola. Does not appear that rational idea.

So far I've used a stereo pair of mics and changed the capsules. The Telinga mic is a lighter solution and designed to wildlife recording and it really shows up. Even if one fields the mil on hands, the handle is designed so well that you don't get the ordinary noise. My first experience is very positive. I like the sensitivity and low noise; the system is designed to capture small sounds.

Will be shooting whole week outdoors and after that can report more details.

[Dave Blackham]

I went through the whitepapers and I am still not sure what microphone(s) I should get for my next shoot. I will be filming seals from ~10m away. Would I be better of with something like MKH-70 shotgun or a Telinga parabolic mic? I can use a boom pole, no problem. At what point a Telinga microphone will produce better results than a long, good quality shotgun?

Shooter, the prices are listed on their website.

Pawel,

I think you'd be better investing in an MKH60 rather than an MKH70. Its shorter and can be paired with an MKH30 figure 8 mic that gives reasonable MS stereo.

There's not much to choose between a 60 and 70 in terms of directionality and the 70 is too long to attempt any form of MS stereo apart form being physically long which can be an issue at times. I have large number of 60/30 kits here and entire range of the various Sennheiser MKH range, out of 200 or so top end mics in our rental fleet the 60/30's are always out. I did have some 70's at one time and they never left the rental store so we sold them in the end. The Sennheiser Mics kit's have rarely required any factory returns for repairs or maintenance and has performed on every continent and environment perfectly well, this includes the Himalayas, Deserts, humid jungles, Antarctica, Oceans and so on. The only damage being when a Yak stood on one mic and bent it, it still continues to work !

The other option with high end mics is the Schoeps CMIT which is excellent and Schoeps do have a small CCM 8 figure 8 mic to pair with it.

Id guess you could say that Sennheiser and Schoeps are the Zeiss and Leica of the audio world.

Id suggest for a high end kit consider either a Sennheiser MKH 30/40 kit which gives excellent stereo this his a cardioid and figure 8 set up, add to this an MKH 60 which is a short gun mic for interview and drama work. Both the MKH 40 and 60 match perfectly so can be interchanged easily. the Schoeps equivalents are CCM4 (cardioid) and CMM 8 which is the figure 8 capsule, the CCM prefix refers to the small mic housing, Schoeps do make larger housed mics if this is preferred Again add the CMIT short gun to offer a short gun to the set up. Also Shoepes do make variants that have HF boost which can be helpful.

As a general rule for wildtracks and atmos Id always use the cardiod/figure 8 as the stereo is so much better than using a short gun and figure 8.

There's a newer range of Sennheiser MKH mics, called the 80 series so 8040, 8050 etc. They are reportedly very good and less expensive then the previous MKH range. I've not used them but id strongly consider them.

I regard mics rather like lenses in that the better mics do hold they value so are a good investment long term. If your going to invest in any sound kit spend you money on mics first, its the single most important items that affects your audio quality. Pay very careful attention to the polar response, its often over looked but is very important to selecting the right mic for the job.

Dave

[Lauri Kettunen]

Just came back from the artic circle where I shot for a week in very cold conditions. Here's the first sample of the Telinga mic. This is a hand held test shot of silence (recorded with Olympus LS-10, Line in with Telinga power box, 48kHz, 24bits) about 10:30 in the evening in a forest, 30-50 cm snow on the ground, temperature was around -25C, bright skies, and I could not hear a thing. It was just a beautiful complete silence. So, perfect conditions for making test recordings.

Notice the slight movement of air around 1min 30s. You can also hear the branches of pines, which move a bit with the air. I think the sparkling kind of sound is from the iced snow on the tree branches. Would like to emphasize, I was not able to hear this or anything else.

The file is about 25 KB. Here's the link:

www.luontovideo.net/Silence090101.WAV

More Red footage samples once I manage to copy all the data from Redraids.

[Lauri Kettunen]

Here's a sample of the Telinga mic with Red One:
(I'm uploading the file, it will take another 10 minutes to get it there. Don't bother with the grading. The file is not graded, instead just ran an automatic conversion from R3D to a small Cineform avi and tried to guess reasonable parameters. Bit too much contrast at least.)

www.luontovideo.net/Eagle.avi

It's a Cineform avi-file, so to view the file you need their free Neo-player. Notice how much it is winding, but still, one can hear the eagle biting the rabbit and the wind does not make akward noise. The mic was about 20 meters from the bird.