Journal #8297

Cheap = under $250? Mics REALLY that expensive??

Hopefully not. $250 is my definite max budget though, and that's if I stretch my food budget a bit thin. I don't really know enough about commercial mics to get a baseline cost, though.

I just use the headphone mic from my beats ._.
I have an headset from my iPhone which I use as a mic, USING an AUDIO splitter.. Don't know if you have one, but mine came with a pair of Aerial 7 Shade headphones ^^

Ghosty, microphones can cost 10 000$ and more.

250$ is more than enough for an good quality home microphone. I think you can get a great one from 100$.

I know some one on TWHL knows about current popular models, but i forgot who it was. You could also ask Archie who probably knows about that a lot as well (since he works as a camera man).

Basically you would judge a microphone by the characteristics that would suit you (Direction, sensitivity, audio range, type, etc).

Still cannot recommend this setup more and it's well within your budget. I've used it for everything from high-end BBC broadcast work to teamspeak with Urby.

It's not designed for field-work, so don't expect to use it as an alternative to a shotgun mic or anything, although I'm fairly sure that's not what you're in the market for.

Not yet, anyway. Thanks for the recommendation!

Ha, good answer!

If it comes to it, I just bought a Panasonic DMW-MS2E for my new camera and it's a pretty god-damn-great shotgun. It's fairly basic, but I doubt you'd find a cheaper mic at this level of quality. I'd normally avoid going against the big names in mics for a shotgun (Sennheiser and Rode being the big players), but when the Senn. 416 (which is what I trained on at college) is up to £900, I really couldn't justify the expense.

Depends on what you define as general, say if you want to record voice and environment sounds you will need different mic's.
For voice its best to get a cardiod pattern mic such as the AT2020.
Though for that kind of a budget this: http://bluemic.com/yetipro/ has all the features you will ever need. Just pick up a shockmount for it.

Blue Snowball is decent enough for the stuff I do (some of which is due to appear on TV) although it has some limitations in terms of OS settings.