help wanted in choosing serious long-distance "zoom" mic(?)

[WaywardTraveller]

Generally speaking, I was wondering if there are any mics out there that would be capable of zeroing in ("zooming" in?) on a lecturer if, worst-case scenario, I was sitting at the top/back of a large lecture hall of a couple hundred people and unable to set up my mic at the very front. Obviously you'd get ambient sounds from other people talking, etc. etc., but as long as I could make out the lecture I wouldn't care.

Maybe it's too much to ask, but hey - you never know unless you try.

peace

WaywardTraveller

[atrain]

maybe something with a parabolic dish? has watching spy movies taught you nothing?

[King Ghidora]

You could set up one of these parabolic dish type mics or much more simply, you could use a shotgun and just ignore the ambient noise. You'll get ambient noise with the parabolic too btw. But you will be able to isolate the speaker better. You hear these types of mics on football games (American football) all the time. When you hear a quarterback calling signals it's because they have a parabolic pointed at him. But it's likely to be overkill for what you're trying to do. I'd get a good shotgun like a Rode VideoMic and use it with a stand so you could aim it perfectly and leave it set.

[A440]

I have no idea if they're any good, but Sony does make what it calls "zoom" mics, You can Google them.

Note that they are mono when they zoom, so you'll need a mono-to-stereo adapter.

Shotguns are also called hypercardioids, because they have the narrowest, straight-ahead pickup pattern.

I don't think you have to go too crazy on this, and probably bringing a big parabolic gizmo to class would make your professor a bit nervous. If you can hear the lecture, your mic should be able to hear it as well.

[King Ghidora]

You can't build a mic that zooms in on a subject like a camera lens will. You can build a mic that changes from a wide pickup area to a narrow pickup area while you push a button that says "zoom" on it. My Panasonic PV-GS250 video camera has what it calls a zoom mic feature on it. It will not bring a far away sound any closer. It will possibly reject ambient noise a little better but a shotgun mic will accomplish the same thing without the extra "zoom" feature.

Anyone calling a mic a zoom mic is spinning the heck out of reality. It's purely a marketing idea. If you have a shotgun mic then you have the best mic you can have for picking up a subject with as little ambient noise as possible. You can add a parabolic dish to make your mic be more sensitive to sound much like cupping your hand around your ear will do. But most definitely you can't really zoom in with a microphone. It just can't be done with the technology that exists today.

Either buy a shotgun mic or a parabolic mic. Some parabolic dishes are pretty small actually. Not all of them are 18 inch monsters like the one in the link I posted. Some are as small as a few inches. You can actually add a parabolic dish to almost any mic and get decent results. Using a Chinese cooking wok is a common way of adding a parabolic dish to a mic. Essentially they just work by reflecting sound back to a point (similar to how a satellite dish works) so your mic gets a louder sound to record. You could probably use a satellite dish if you wanted to add it to a mic. They would be the right shape and you would have an idea where to put the mic by looking at where the feed horn of the dish would be.

[royalrepis]

Unfortunately you would either need to use a good Shotgun microphone much like the Sennheiser ME66 Short Shotgun or have some sort of parabolic dish setup. Or possibly a set of hyper card's.