42 l June 2013
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Diaphragms anddigits
Although ‘conventional’ digital microphones have found an audience, the en masse arrival of digital wireless systems
could be poised to prise open a more substantial market. But as David Davies discovers, not everyone is convinced just yet...
DIFFICULT THOUGH it may be to believe, it is now more than 15 years since beyerdynamic introduced the MDC 100 and effectively kickstarted the digital microphone era. But despite the variety of digital microphones that have been brought to the market in the intervening period, it has sometimes felt like a movement that hasn’t quite attained full momentum. Although the higher price- points of digital microphones have
undoubtedly played a part, there’s little doubt
that their benefits over analogue equivalents haven’t always been explained clearly or concisely. Performers’ understandable inclination towards ‘classic’ mics has also helped to slow the adoption of newer techniques. Nonetheless, a handful of manufacturers – among them Neumann, Milab and Schoeps – have managed to carve out a rewarding niche for their wired digital mics.
In 2013, the landscape is changing once again, with Sennheiser’s Digital 9000 and Line6’s XD-V75 among the flag-wavers for digital wireless technologies. With pro-users seemingly more cognisant of the benefits of flexible set-up/operation and fully uncompressed audio, could it be that digital
microphones’ standing and status is about to take a decisive step forwards?
WIRED FOR SOUND For the earliest exponents of digital mics, the advantages they were offering to the user were clear: principal among them an increase in dynamic range; a built-in limiter that could prevent clipping; and the avoidance of noise accrued from the signal passing through analogue circuitry. Moreover, in a wider context, they could form part of the shift towards audio digitisation. But approaches differed to an extent that wasn’t likely to alleviate consumer confusion about a still-fledgling segment – hence the call, from the late ’90s onwards, for a standards- backed approach to digital microphone interfaces. Initially published in 2001, AES42 stipulates
Milab DM-1001 microphone with phantom power unit
that microphones directly output a digital audio steam through an XLR or XLD male connector, as opposed to producing an analogue output. Digital microphones can then be connected directly to equipment
“The benefits of digitising all the way through, from the mic head, are not sufficient [to justify user investment]”
Christian Poulsen, DPA Microphones
with AES42 connectivity, or via dedicated interfaces – of which RME and Neumann have been among the leading exponents. Without doubt, AES42
has brought clarity to the deployment of wired digital mics (it does not cover wireless), and in the past decade it has received two significant updates: the first in 2006, with the addition of features to facilitate the control of internal microphone processing by external devices, such as mixing desks; and the second in 2011, with further measures to allow storage and recall of user settings in the microphone itself. Along with Neumann (specifically, the D-01), Schoeps was one of the first companies to bring an AES42 mic to market in
the form of the CMD-2. Today, its primary digital model is the SuperCMIT digital shotgun microphone – a product that, says Schoeps R&D engineer and product manager Hans Riekehof, “would not be possible without digital technology. Just digitisation inside the microphone is not a big benefit. Things start to get really interesting when you implement certain functions which are not possible [with] analogue.” Accordingly, he points to SuperCMIT’s use of a beamforming algorithm “to increase the directivity at low frequencies where conventional shotgun microphones are typically just supercardioids. Meanwhile, another algorithm is able to suppress the diffuse
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