According Pete Dugas, president of Athens, Georgia–based Technical Services Audio Visual (TSAV), Sennheiser’s gooseneck-mounting ME 36 mini-shotgun microphone capsule has impacted the company’s audio system designs.
“That microphone has allowed for change in our approach to sound system design in a lot of applications,” says Dugas, whose professional audio-visual consulting, contracting and integration company has been in operation since 1991. “When I’m working in a highly reverberant environment or a situation where there are a lot of novice users and operators, I go to this mic.”
The Sennheiser ME 36 is a back-electret condenser microphone head mounted on the MZH 3015 gooseneck that offers a supercardioid pattern for a wide range of speech applications. The ME 36 also incorporates the ME 105 capsule from Sennheiser’s series of modular lavalier products.
“In speech reinforcement systems where the system is designed for constricted bandwidth, it’s perfect,” Dugas says. “Not that the bandwidth of the mic is constricted, but I can adjust it to the point where the gain before feedback ratios are astronomically different than they are in a traditional condenser microphone in that sort of application.”
That has allowed TSAV to implement trouble-free speech reinforcement in venues where the loudspeaker placement is far from ideal. For example, offers Dugas, “We used them in a ’70s-era convention hall at the University of Georgia [pictured]. The speaker cluster had been hung low over the stage in order to shoot back into an area at the rear of the room, and the distance from the presenter’s position to the cluster was 16 feet. The speakers were ‘lobing’ a little bit, and the only way for us to get gain before feedback ratios that worked in most public speaking setups—short of correcting the loudspeaker system design, which was cost prohibitive for the project—was to use the ME 36.”
TSAV installed a digital front-end to the system so that a preset could be selected for full-bandwidth music applications. “But when it was a speech-only situation and you had novice speakers, you would use the Sennheiser microphone, click to another preset and it would bring up a limited bandwidth setup,” Dugas explains.
For more information, visit www.sennheiserusa.com and www.tsav.com.
