Furthermore, the mic’s operating temperature range is listed as ‑40 to +80 degrees celsius, and you can even use the transducer underwater, so it’s clearly no shrinking violet! I do question the use of DIP switches for settings that you’re likely to be changing day to day, though. Indeed, the manufacturer’s product video shows the transducer being run over by a car without damage, and I can well believe it. The whole package feels neatly put together, and the mostly metal construction seems pretty robust too. The Cortado’s published frequency response is an impressive 23Hz‑40kHz (at the ‑3dB points), and the provided plots show that the sub‑100Hz region gets a couple of decibels warmer when the pad’s engaged. On the underside of the preamp are four miniature DIP slide‑switches, two of which can activate a ‑10dB input pad, while the others determine whether the preamp’s internal high‑pass filter rolls off at either 23Hz or 150Hz. The preamp’s active electronics receive phantom power from the box’s single male XLR socket, which also serves as the balanced audio output. A slim 185cm shielded cable sprouting from the tin’s side connects its internal vibration transducer to a Class‑A preamp, housed in a separate 43 x 43 x 83 mm steel box. The business end of the Cortado MkIII looks, for all the world, like one of those little tins of lip‑salve, measuring about 36mm in diameter and 14mm thick. But does a contact mic really deserve a place alongside traditional mics in the studio? Let’s find out. As such, I’d mentally filed contact mics under ‘break glass in case of drum triggering’ ever since.Ī couple of months ago, however, my interest was rekindled by a new product from Chicago‑based company Zeppelin Design Labs: their Cortado MkIII, a contact mic that aims to elevate this transducer concept into a bona fide recording tool. I remember buying one out of sheer curiosity about 15 years ago, but it was a fiddly, cheap‑looking thing that was noisy as hell and made my violin sound like a cat in a biscuit tin. To be frank, though, contact mics have always seemed pretty niche to me as far as everyday recording tasks are concerned. the air) by directly transducing the sound source’s physical vibrations into a voltage signal. But there’s one specialist mic design, called a contact mic, that can cut out the middleman (ie. What would you record with an indestructible microphone?įor the most part, microphones are designed to pick up vibrations in the air that have been created by some kind of physically vibrating sound source.
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