As my plans to start a production company in high school begin to come together, my friends and I have begun our search for equipment. One of my friends scored us some lighting equipment, although we may need more, as well as an absolute beast of a computer, and I got us cameras and a couple tripods. One of the last, and I assume one of the most important things we need is sound equipment. I have no idea where to start when it comes to sound, so I’d love some suggestions for decent equipment at a decent price. We are, of course, poor high schooler, and therefore probably won’t be able to afford anything more than a couple hundred dollars without starting like a fundraiser or something. If anyone knows of any good stuff like this, please let me know. Thanks!!
sound-dept Need Some Suggestions for Relatively Cheap Sound Equipment
- Thread starter NuttyFilms
- Start date
First off, kudos for recognizing that sound is important!
I don’t think a couple hundred dollars will cover it, because there are a few basic pieces and parts that add up, even on the low-budget end. Fortunately, there are a few lower-cost options that can get you started.
Before I list that stuff, though, I highly recommend that someone on your team step up to take on sound and learn how to get it right. Having one person specialize in any given area makes the whole team stronger, as opposed to trying to make everyone interchangeable multitaskers. If everyone‘s attention is diluted, everything suffers. I mentioned this in your other thread asking about good starter cameras.
While professional sound these days is recorded with some very complex, and very expensive, systems, sound for film and TV was once accomplished simply with a boomed mic and a recorder. So that’s where we’ll start. You need a good mic, an extendable boom pole to get it into the action, proper suspension mounting and windscreening, and cable. Then, you need a good recorder or mixer-recorder, and trustworthy headphones. Last, you need a way to sync the sound to the picture in post.
On the most basic level, I’d recommend the Tascam DR-60D mkII as a decent and reliable recorder. $199
You’ll need a couple of SD cards (never have just one), about $25.
There‘s also a good, low-cost bag that comes with (rudimentary but functional) harness, from STRUT. $119.99
For the mic, the Audio Technica AT875R is a really good bang-for the buck option. $149
For wind protection, the Rycote Classic Softie. $99
And you’ll need a shock mount to avoid handling noise from the boom. Rycote InVision INV-HG mkIII. $69
A 9’ boom pole is more than enough to get you started. The K-Tek Airo is actually 10’, but isn’t internally cabled. $114.95
So you’ll need a 15’ XLR cable, about $25
For headphones, the Sony MDR-7506 are pretty standard. They’re also accurate. $84
Last, you’ll need a dumb slate (clapper) to slate each shot for sync in post. There are a couple good options from Elvid. $34
The DR-60D mkII doesn’t allow much room for expansion when (not if) you hit the point where you need to add wireless, so alternatively you might look at the slightly larger DR-70D ($279) and Strut case/harness ($134). This is all about channel count. A boom and 2-3 wireless can cover a lot of ground.
I know, it’s a lot more than you were wanting. Anything cheaper is, well, cheaper.
Just curious: which cameras did you end up getting, and what types of projects are you wanting to focus on?
I don’t think a couple hundred dollars will cover it, because there are a few basic pieces and parts that add up, even on the low-budget end. Fortunately, there are a few lower-cost options that can get you started.
Before I list that stuff, though, I highly recommend that someone on your team step up to take on sound and learn how to get it right. Having one person specialize in any given area makes the whole team stronger, as opposed to trying to make everyone interchangeable multitaskers. If everyone‘s attention is diluted, everything suffers. I mentioned this in your other thread asking about good starter cameras.
While professional sound these days is recorded with some very complex, and very expensive, systems, sound for film and TV was once accomplished simply with a boomed mic and a recorder. So that’s where we’ll start. You need a good mic, an extendable boom pole to get it into the action, proper suspension mounting and windscreening, and cable. Then, you need a good recorder or mixer-recorder, and trustworthy headphones. Last, you need a way to sync the sound to the picture in post.
On the most basic level, I’d recommend the Tascam DR-60D mkII as a decent and reliable recorder. $199
You’ll need a couple of SD cards (never have just one), about $25.
There‘s also a good, low-cost bag that comes with (rudimentary but functional) harness, from STRUT. $119.99
For the mic, the Audio Technica AT875R is a really good bang-for the buck option. $149
For wind protection, the Rycote Classic Softie. $99
And you’ll need a shock mount to avoid handling noise from the boom. Rycote InVision INV-HG mkIII. $69
A 9’ boom pole is more than enough to get you started. The K-Tek Airo is actually 10’, but isn’t internally cabled. $114.95
So you’ll need a 15’ XLR cable, about $25
For headphones, the Sony MDR-7506 are pretty standard. They’re also accurate. $84
Last, you’ll need a dumb slate (clapper) to slate each shot for sync in post. There are a couple good options from Elvid. $34
The DR-60D mkII doesn’t allow much room for expansion when (not if) you hit the point where you need to add wireless, so alternatively you might look at the slightly larger DR-70D ($279) and Strut case/harness ($134). This is all about channel count. A boom and 2-3 wireless can cover a lot of ground.
I know, it’s a lot more than you were wanting. Anything cheaper is, well, cheaper.
Just curious: which cameras did you end up getting, and what types of projects are you wanting to focus on?
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Hire/retain someone who knows what they are doing. This will take a lot of strain off of you. It will also give you solid production sound so your audio post process/DX edit will be a creative endeavor and not a rescue operation.
Don't buy, RENT! As a mentor once told me, "If you don't use it every day, you don't need to own it." I had a full-on audio post facility (before Hurricane Ida destroyed it) and lots of mics, but I rented a recorder/mixer for field recording, project budget permitting, of course. If you rent, you'll get much better quality gear than what you could buy.
This is a topic where there is really no one clear answer.
I would say the most important thing you're going to buy is the recorder itself. You could have a $3,000 microphone but if you plug it into the tascam 60-d, it's gonna sound like it was recorded on a tascam 60-d.
In my opinion you're way better off buying a zoom recorder. The new zoom h6 or the F1 are the best starter recorders in my opinion.
You get a very decent pre-amp which means less hissing from the noise floor and a cleaner signal overall. Which is very helpful for not making people sound underwater when doing noise/reverb reduction.
I would start off with one or two F1 recorders since they can double as lav recorders or shotgun recorders and the audio quality is practically the same.
The rode ntg 4 is my personal microphone but we used a sennheiser shotgun for most of our work that i think maybe I like slightly more. I can get the name of it if you want. But for less than $600 I haven't heard a shotgun mic I would get other than Rhode.
And you should drop $300 on a decent dead cat (or diy or go used) a good dead cat can be the difference between life and death for on location audio. Even indoors.
I agree with Alcove about finding a dedicated audio person. It's more complicated than it seems and it does require an amount of attention that someone with multiple jobs isn't likely to do well with. You'd maybe be better off finding a guy with equipment and paying him at first.
One thing I feel like I see a lot of people disregard is the concept that everything you're doing takes time and you might only get to re-do a scene so many times. You want to minimize reasons your project won't get finished as much as possible.
I would say the most important thing you're going to buy is the recorder itself. You could have a $3,000 microphone but if you plug it into the tascam 60-d, it's gonna sound like it was recorded on a tascam 60-d.
In my opinion you're way better off buying a zoom recorder. The new zoom h6 or the F1 are the best starter recorders in my opinion.
You get a very decent pre-amp which means less hissing from the noise floor and a cleaner signal overall. Which is very helpful for not making people sound underwater when doing noise/reverb reduction.
I would start off with one or two F1 recorders since they can double as lav recorders or shotgun recorders and the audio quality is practically the same.
The rode ntg 4 is my personal microphone but we used a sennheiser shotgun for most of our work that i think maybe I like slightly more. I can get the name of it if you want. But for less than $600 I haven't heard a shotgun mic I would get other than Rhode.
And you should drop $300 on a decent dead cat (or diy or go used) a good dead cat can be the difference between life and death for on location audio. Even indoors.
I agree with Alcove about finding a dedicated audio person. It's more complicated than it seems and it does require an amount of attention that someone with multiple jobs isn't likely to do well with. You'd maybe be better off finding a guy with equipment and paying him at first.
One thing I feel like I see a lot of people disregard is the concept that everything you're doing takes time and you might only get to re-do a scene so many times. You want to minimize reasons your project won't get finished as much as possible.
Disagree. The microphone is your first barrier to sound recording. A good mic through a lesser pre-amp will sound better than a bad mic through a good pre-amp. You can’t ever improve the sound captured by the mic with anything downstream, but you can maintain it and you can certainly destroy it. Just the same, the lens is the most important part of the camera package… you can’t improve the image downstream, only maintain or destroy it.
The weakness in the pre-amp on the DR-60DmkII is clean gain. Pusing past about 65% introduces noise. To compensate, it needs to be matched with a mic that has pretty high output, like the AT-875r.
As far as buy vs. hire vs. rent, I would normally advise hiring a professional (especially as someone whose full-time freelance profession is location sound). But there’s one important thing here that I think has been glossed over:
Here’s the thing: these kids are doing everything on the entry level. This is the time to learn, and I doubt they’re doing anything at all on the level that can budget $1200+ a day for a location sound mixer. As this group start to refine their skillsets, I do think it’s beneficial that one of them take on sound as a focus. If NuttyFilms had instead posted something like “I’m starting out in location sound and need some gear recommendations”, we’d be having a very different conversation here. So that’s how I interpreted the original post.
The other point is that their stated budget for buying a functional sound kit is unrealistic for basic recording quality. To that point, it may be more feasible at this point to rent a decent sound package when needed. But I still think, as a group of highschoolers trying to start their own little production company, there’s a bare-minimum package that might be worth buying if they can swing it. Their “couple hundred dollars” won’t even rent a full location sound bag for a day. And though $1000 can buy a decently-functional, very basic package, $2000-3000 is a better target to get beefier gear that will grow more elegantly as skills and project needs grow.
So, @NuttyFilms, I don’t know where you are on this now, since the original post is from four months ago. Would love to hear what you have going on, and if you’d made any decisions on sound. You can buy a bare-bones, entry-level sound package for just under $1000 ($3000 for a better investment), or you can rent a sound package for $400+/day. Or you can pay $1200 or more a day to hire a professional with gear.
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Everyone reading this line should take a mental note. This core concept is one of the most important in all of film or audio. The quality you capture initially is your max quality. You can enhance that signal down the chain, but once quality is destroyed at any stage in the pipe, it is never recovered. Always think in terms of capturing and preserving core quality first, and damage control and rescue measures should never be considered part of the original plan. Obviously nothing ever goes perfectly, but at the same time, don't weave mistakes into your plan on purpose. Example given - This fan is noisy, so I'll use noise gates and compressors and eq to get rid of it in post. That's wrong, turn off the fan. You got a quiet place, but then a car drove past in the background while you shot an expensive scene, like someone smashing a tv with a bat. That's when you resort to post edit rescue tactics. Bottom line, there is nothing better than the real thing, so that should always be the target.
This is the source of the old Hollywood joke "We'll fix it in post", it's a joke because you won't be fixing it in post.
I'll add on that for good results on the cheap, it's hard to do better than a 15 dollar artlist subscription, that allows you to use hundreds of thousands of clean, well produced sound effects, pre licensed, and searchable.
In example, if you needed traffic sounds in your shot of a guy standing and waiting for the walk sign at an intersection, you would get a way cleaner result by just silencing your footage and overdubbing some professionally recorded traffic. Grab a few extra car brake squeals and time them to some of the cars stopping, and you're good, with no noise, no cheap mic sound, etc.
It can save a lot of money and time vs buying a Mitra and standing around all day waiting for the wind to die down.
In example, if you needed traffic sounds in your shot of a guy standing and waiting for the walk sign at an intersection, you would get a way cleaner result by just silencing your footage and overdubbing some professionally recorded traffic. Grab a few extra car brake squeals and time them to some of the cars stopping, and you're good, with no noise, no cheap mic sound, etc.
It can save a lot of money and time vs buying a Mitra and standing around all day waiting for the wind to die down.
As a professional, I understand what you're saying, but in this guy's case that's probably not the best way to look at it. Firstly, a microphone isn't a camera. You can stare at frequency response charts till you're blue in the face, but for the most part, the most degradation to quality audio is in the accuracy, distortion, clipping and overall encoding tonality and fidelity introduced by amplification.
Yes, you can try to get around it with a mic that has a better preamp but all that's going to do is separate you a little from an already heightened noise floor.
It's like if you had the best color grading monitor in the world, and the glass that goes in front of the screen had artifacts and dust all over it and you tried to fix it by raising the brightness. You're still degrading the signal.
There are many affordable mics and they're a much better item to invest in having a stock of than a field recorder. If he was recording into an f1, I would say follow your advice and record with a better mic. But that 60-d quality is $200 for slightly better audio than if you just recorded to the camera with a xlr to headphone jack.
Meanwhile $135 spent on an f1 gets you quality that passes qc every time
Yes, you can try to get around it with a mic that has a better preamp but all that's going to do is separate you a little from an already heightened noise floor.
It's like if you had the best color grading monitor in the world, and the glass that goes in front of the screen had artifacts and dust all over it and you tried to fix it by raising the brightness. You're still degrading the signal.
There are many affordable mics and they're a much better item to invest in having a stock of than a field recorder. If he was recording into an f1, I would say follow your advice and record with a better mic. But that 60-d quality is $200 for slightly better audio than if you just recorded to the camera with a xlr to headphone jack.
Meanwhile $135 spent on an f1 gets you quality that passes qc every time
I… never said it was.
A shit mic is going to sound like a shit mic, no matter what comes after it. You’ll never get a RØDE NTG2 to sound like a Schoeps. The second link in the chain is the pre-amp, which can only pass on the mic’s signal at full quality, or do its own work to degrade the signal quality.
Well, pre-amps are typically found in mixers/recorders, not in mics.
The DR-60DmkII doesn’t sound awful, as long as the pre-amp gain isn’t pushed too high. The AT875r is a remarkably good-sounding shotgun mic (especially considering its price) that has a higher sensitivity and lower impedance, making for a hotter output signal and minimizing how much pre-amp gain is needed. These two together actually work quite well. I still keep a 60DmkII on the shelf, right next to my 888, and I’ve delivered audio recorded on it to national cable programming with absolutely no issues from post.
This… I don’t… what?
So you clean the damn glass. And if you were trying to mix audio on Genelecs that were wrapped up in winter blankets, you wouldn’t try to fix it by cranking up the high-mids and highs with EQ in your mix; you’d remove the blankets.
This makes no sense at all and has absolutely nothing to do with the original recorded signal.
Any good recording package has a selection of good mics, rather than just one. As for that second part… regardless of the mixer/recorder in use, always start with the best mic you can.
Well, you’re not going to get anywhere trying to record into a headphone jack. Headphone jacks send monitor signal out. They don’t take signals in.
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I was referring to you talking about the signal chain. The way you're talking about this concept is how a lot of people who come from the video side of things tend to think about it. But when it comes to audio, the concept plays out a little differently.
A rode mic is agreeably not the greatest sounding mic ever built. But it operates on a professional level and is a solid starter mic. Really, there are a lot of mics for between $300-600 which I believe are great budget options.
Most microphones come equipped with a pre-amp built in. This is actually the more traditional use of the phrase where you might know of a pre-amp in terms of a mixer where the signal chain can become more complicated. But even for mics with a built in pre-amp, it's very much in an engineers best interest to consider the pre-amp part of the mic. It's a big part of what separates a $1,200 mic from a 10k mic. Second to desirable frequency response.
Fair enough, but you can still get better quality, cheaper, smaller more versitile. (recorder) the microphone I take less issue with, he should just understand going into a purchase like that the AT875r is a very short range mic, it's designed to be held by a boom pole operater for very tight shots where it's less than 2-3 feet from the subject. Which isn't the end of the world necessarily. Maybe it's my bad, I thought we were talking about traditional shotgun mics
I think we're both lost on this one, I wasn't talking about eq'ing. The point I was trying to make is once the signal is degraded, increasing the volume going into the pre-amp is only going to do so much. Yes, the noise floor is a little less of a problem but you're still degrading the overall toneallity of the input signal. Maybe a better anology would be to liken it to having a cinematographer set up amazing lighting and a beautiful scene, but then you record on cheap film: The pre-amp is just as much "the first part of the chain" as the diaphragm in the mic.
Completely agree, that's why I think my suggestion to spend a little less on a better, newer field recorder so you can spend more on a higher quality microphone that is versatile, is better (respectfully) than the suggestion to spend $200 on a field recorder that was the best of its level you could get for a long time; I agree, but to pair that with a AT875r and it's his first microphone. I feel like that's not taking advantage of how much better of a position he is in then I or I'm sure you were in when we started.
I'll take this one as a cheeky joke. You got me. I said headphone jack instead of 3.5mm microphone input port.
25+ years in sound for TV/film here, but okay.
I stand by my analogy: shit mic cannot be fixed by any preamp, great mic gives the best starting signal quality. Likewise, a shit lens can’t be fixed by any camera’s image sensor and processing, but a great lens gives the best starting image quality.
No point in arguing this further. I have an early call tomorrow, and we’re WAY past anything helpful to the OP.
And it's from August!
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