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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

I should write up my solution using a parabolic dish that focuses sound from a relatively small zone where my head (usually) is, into a good cheap mic. You get good isolation (even from keyboard sounds) requires nothing on your head or throat, and ... physics! (You just need to accept a big dish in your field of view, and you also can't pace, walk around, as with bluetooth solutions.)

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This actually sounds sick :)

You know what is crazy, those microphone guns[0] mics might actually be amazing.

I know that people (youtubers) actually have problems with being able to turn their A/Cs on because of the background noise... Rather than trying to remove that noise with AI/post processing or turning the A/C off maybe people should be looking into microphone guns.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Sony-ECMGZ1M-Zoom-Microphone-Black/dp...

Also known as shotgun mics.

Marketing has pushed a lot of Youtubers towards LDCs like the Blue Yeti, which are great in a studio setting but pick up lots of background noise. For some reason everyone considers the SM7B as the way around that (despite being overkill and overpriced for their applications), which is a broadcast dynamic. Dynamics can handle fan noise and busy streets no problem.

There are less expensive handheld dynamics which are suitable for Youtubers, like the SM58 (very few of them use that, but it's ubiquitious in live sound and with processing can sound very decent). Sennheiser and AKG also make good stuff. If those don't provide enough isolation there are ENG dynamics that are designed to handle interviews in the middle of loud protests and such.

I think a big part is the looks. The SM58 is not visually distinct from a $10 mic for a karaoke machine. The integrated pop filter means you don't even get to have the "super professional" look of a pop filter a few inches in front of your LDC.

I considered making a box that accepts inputs from dynamic mics, adds some warmth, and has a USB output, to make it easier to get the LDC sound from something like an SM58, but I think nobody would buy it.

There exactly is a product like that - the Behringer UV1. I'm guessing that they saw that streamers were buying the DBX 286 and an interface and decided to capitalize on that. Though to be honest all that processing could be done in software, even in OBS itself.

What I find sad is that Youtubers who aren't that popular are spending nearly a grand on a SM7B, a 286, a phantom preamp, and an interface for that "look". In reality, you could get similar sound with less than $200 (interface and handheld dynamic) and most viewers would not hear the difference.

An SM57 with foam pop filter (sure a2ws-bk) looks similar to an SM7B for about 1/5th the price. Sounds good too

> If those don't provide enough isolation there are ENG dynamics that are designed to handle interviews in the middle of loud protests and such.

Do you have a link? "ENG dynamic microphone" doesn't bring anything useful up for me

They're the mics that news reporters use when interviewing people on the street. Popular models include the EV RE50 (omni) and Senn MD46 (cardioid). They're designed for intelligibility and cut down sound from distant sources well without much processing.

ENG is "Electronic News Gathering" it's designed to only pickup sounds very close to the mic, as for news reporters who need to sound good in very noisy environments. It's probably overkill if you have a quiet interior room in your house, but if you don't, an omnidirectional ENG is a great option and you can get decent ones for under $200.

A smaller form factor solution would be an array of mems mics and some software for beam forming. It's pretty popular in enterprise teleconference equipment these days. You can also solve the pacing problem by steering the beams but that's a difficult software problem to solve

I used the crappiest $5 mic I had with a large steel salad bowl to listen to normal conversations 100 feet away. It's incredible what you can pull up. A normal sized bowl mounted on a little tripod on your desk would work great. Add some head tracking with a webcam and you can go mobile. Or just have someone point it at your mouth the whole time like in the NFL: https://imgur.com/a/hyN9V

So, to go even more nerdy on this idea, create a microphone array and steer the input precisely at your mouth. Bonus, you can program the FPGAs to do this yourself!

This is what some "conference phones" do -- I have an Anker powerconf, which has an array of six microphones and is very good at beamforming. It sits on my desk for general use, and I also use it for meetings with multiple local participants. It's better than the much-more-expensive conference room mic setups we have in the office.

How does this compare against the more mainstream shotgun mic?

Mine is more physics-y.

Even mics with passive rejection (basically an omnidirectional mic facing outwards that passively cancels the input from the cardioid mic facing your mouth) do pretty well at these tasks.

Antlion and Sennheiser make good passive rejection mics.

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