Mini remote michrophone set up, help

[chaz]

I need some advice folks and hope I'm in the right technical area.

I'm part of a marching concertina band (squeeze box) and many many years ago once saw musicians using portable speakers (on the hip) to amplify the sound of our instruments. After intense research the only answer I get is "they were massive and the batteries were heavy, they were ugly and the wires were unsightly".

I keep envisaging there must be a 2011 answer to all this and there must be a mini wireless microphone option sitting on the concertina with a cigarette packet sized speaker with compact long lasting batteries?

As you can see I know what I'd like but I just dont know what I'm lookig for as the techno language beats me on the many many sites viewed, I also dont want to buy the wrong thing.

Need to try one - if it works 10

If this is the wrong forum, I'll move on.

Can anyone help?

Chaz

 

[Sceadwian]

You could use compact car audio type equipment powered off a 4 cell Lithium Ion pack, it will be heavy but still man portable. The hard part is discovering what amount of audio output power you'll need to get the loudness you require. One way to determine this would be to use a commercial amplifier of a known wattage, use a mic/amp to play your squeezebox through it, and turn the volume dial 1-10 up to the volume you think you're going to want to produce. The number on the dial divided by ten will give you a value between .1 (10 percent) and 1 (100%) of the total output power used, multiple that times the known wattage of the system you used and you'll have an approximation of how much power you'll need for the portable system.

Come back with that number and we might be able to help you better.

One problem is how you record this test will effect the results in the real world device, microphone placement is hyper critical and I'm not sure where the best location for a microphone is in your instrument, that would be something you'd need to research, there has to be sites out there that have tips on microphone placements for acoustical instruments.

For starters if you have the ability to do so, simply place the microphone (a simple condenser mic such as the typical PC uses would be fine) near the primary sound output of the instrument (but away from any air it's exausting) and start your test from there, that'll give you a ballpark. Proper placement of the microphone and the gain of the pre-amp are also pretty important, but one step at a time.

 

[groovytech]

go to guitar center,get a small practice amp that can be worn on your belt. they'll be able to help you find the right mic also.

 

[Sceadwian]

Would that be loud enough? Squeeze boxes by themselves are already pretty loud.

 

[audioguru]

The hard part is discovering what amount of audio output power you'll need to get the loudness you require. One way to determine this would be to use a commercial amplifier of a known wattage, use a mic/amp to play your squeezebox through it, and turn the volume dial 1-10 up to the volume you think you're going to want to produce. The number on the dial divided by ten will give you a value between .1 (10 percent) and 1 (100%) of the total output power used

Absolutely not!
1) The gain of the amplifier is much higher than is needed (allowing you to turn up the volume when you play, speak or sing softly) so its full power will be with the volume control set much less than at max setting.
2) A volume control is logarithmic, not linear so at half setting (not the physical setting as described above) the output power is 1/10th to 1/20th max power.

The mic will hear the speaker. Then what will prevent acoustic feedback howling? You probably will not be able to amplify the sound at all.

 

[chaz]

Thanks for the advice folks - never thought of our local guitar shop, may be a lot simpler to let them experiment with a small pickup device.

As regards loudness, we're a marching band in amongst 12-15 other bands all playing to maximum on drums and various instruments. At present we have a 25 strength flute band behind us blowing us out and thats why I'm doing this.

ta folks

 

[picbuck]

PS: Where the heck did anybody find 25 flute players?!