IoSR Blog : 1 November 2013

Microphone of the month - October

We've recently started using an online booking system for all our studios and equipment (if you're interested, it's based on the open source phpScheduleIt). One of the useful things about it, apart from allowing students to book things from anywhere via their laptops / tablets / smartphones / iTrousers, is that we can view usage statistics of all the facilities. So we thought that we'd try to employ it for some less mundane uses.

Our favourite vaguely sensible idea was microphone of the month: the microphone that's been booked most in the preceding month. Hopefully by doing this we can show off our extensive microphone collection one by one (we have over 100 at the last count), and it might encourage students to try out a wider range of them. Or maybe highlight their lack of adventurousness?

So with no further ado, the microphone of the month for October is the Neumann U87Ai no. 1. One of three U87s that we own, it's a large diaphragm condenser microphone, switchable between omnidirectional, fig-8 and cardioid polar patterns, and with built-in switchable pad and high-pass filter. It was apparently recently voted the best microphone by Sound on Sound readers. Well, U87s generally were, not just our one. But maybe there's some overlap between our students and Sound on Sound readers?

If we keep doing this every month, we'll be able to turn it into a calendar!

by Russell Mason