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October 2021

Audio Gear

Field recording with the Rycote HC-15 and HC-22 mics

October 25, 2021
Out capturing ambiences with the Rycote mics

Following on from my initial tests and review of the Rycote’s first mics – the HC-15 and HC-22 shotgun mics – this shorter post adds some tests of ambience and nature recordings with both mics individually and combined with an AKG CK94 fig 8 mic to give mid-side stereo recordings.

Kicking off at home, I recorded the sounds of what I thought was my quiet Norfolk village street at dusk: birds calling, a tractor passing etc. So I could get the different mid-side recordings at the same time, this meant putting the two Rycote mics and fig 8 together in a blimp as shown in the image below. Experience says that there will be only an imperceptible shadowing effect by the clustered configuration of the mics. The AKG CK94 has a much lower sensitivity, so I added 8dB of gain: it should perhaps have a little more (another 4dB?), but I have posted the individual wav files anyway below.

Rigging three mics for the simultaneous HC-15 and HC-22 mid-side recordings.

Here are the various village street ambiences, both the two mid-side recordings and the individual tracks. I’ve included the AKG CK94 track too, since it shows the origins of any hiss: the two Rycote mics, of course, have unusually low self-noise for shotgun (indeed any SDC) mics at 8.5 dBA (+/- 2 dB).

Looking inland at Cley beach, over the salt marshes.

Heading to the beach with just the Rycote HC-22 and the AKG CK94 in a blimp, here are some more recordings, one slightly away from the waves (with bird calls) and one close to the sea. This time I’ve included the mid-side recordings and the HC-22 tracks on their own. And this time the CK94 fig 8 mic has its gain up 12dB from the Rycote mic, to fully compensate for its lower sensitivity. Watch out for listening levels, especially for the waves – much louder than the village street ambiences above.

Recording the static bells in the massive early 12th-century belfry at Norwich Cathedral.

For something very different, I headed off to Norwich and up the tight spiral stairs into the belfry at the cathedral. The bells have been hung for static chiming since the 19th century, but the five bells (four from the late 15th century, one from 1635) still mark the hours and the quarters. And, needless to say, they are very loud within the belfry. In the recordings – again mid-side (this time with the HC-15 and the AKG CK94, and, for comparison, the hypercardioid AKG CK93 with the AKG CK94) – you can hear the wind whistling through the louvres, the clock setting the chimes in motion, and the automatic clappers chiming the bells.

Obviously using a shotgun mic as part of a mid-side pair for stereo ambiences is a slightly odd choice, and not one I would make normally, but there is a relevance to such tests as location sound recordists do use this combination when they want stereo coverage in addition to the focus of their interest with the mono shotgun. A more typical use of the shotgun mic for nature and sound effects recording, of course, is for focusing tightly on point sources for mono recordings, and with the low noise and good off-axis sound, there is little doubt that the HC-15 and, for a tighter focus, the HC-22 are excellent choices.

Audio Gear

Rycote’s first microphones – review and tests of the HC-15 and HC-22 shotgun mics

October 13, 2021

New microphone manufacturers appear from time-to-time, but when I heard that Rycote – with over 50 years of well-respected design and manufacturing of microphone windshields and suspensions – were producing their first microphones, this stood out as something rather different: both their reputation and experience with other mics suggested that this could be an intriguing addition to the market. Given Rycote’s long involvement with broadcast and film sound, it isn’t that surprising that the two mics are both shotguns: one 15cm long and the other 22cm, giving rise to the HC-15 and HC-22 names. The specs fueled my initial interest as did the fact that they are made entirely in the UK at Rycote’s factory in Stroud. The price is interesting too, with the HC-15 costing £560 and the HC-22 £575 (ex VAT). This places the mics in slightly underpopulated territory, well above the list prices for the Rode NTG5 and NTG3, but well below the list price of the Sanken CS1-E or, say, the Audio Technica BP4073. Many staples of location sound recordists – such as the various shotgun mics made by Sennheiser, Schoeps and DPA – are more costly still. So, intrigued by all this and knowing Rycote to be a friendly and approachable company (see, for example, their help with my oversized LDC mic windshield), I asked whether they would let me review and test the mics: a few email exchanges later, and the mics arrived last week – no conditions/obligations applied nor, indeed, any timescale for their return! They included some foamies and a Classic Softie kit, with a Nano Shield (out of stock) on its way soon.

The approach

I don’t know about you, but I’m not overly excited by mic reviews – usually vlogs – that involve unboxing and reiteration of the published specs, in this case readily available online on the Rycote website, along with some tests of the mics in an unlikely location (e.g. with shotgun mics locked off above a vlogger’s head in their indoor studio). Of course, there is a value in comparative tests of mics, despite the danger (for shotgun mics) of these ending up being grouped in static arrays, but the number of professional shotguns available means that this is outside the scope of what I can do: for the nuances of Mic A vs Mic B there is no substitute for testing and working with both mics yourself and no review or on-line test is going to replace that. Rather, the focus of this review is a series of more real-world tests with the two Rycote mics, some out and about on location, with the aim to see if the Rycote mics are contenders for serious use. Sometimes I use another mic for the purpose of comparison, or to illustrate a point, and mostly I use the HC-15 and HC-22 together – which at least helps clarify the differences between the two. Sometimes I use the HC-15 and HC-22 in combination with a fig 8, to see how they stand up is the mid mic in a mid-side stereo pair: common use for a shotgun mic. But you won’t find any tests of the mics mounted on a camera: I’ve yet to find a need for this, and my gut feeling for such use is the compromised positioning means a more modest shotgun (and perhaps one without P48) will do the job.

Rabbit rabbit

With dialogue or speech recording being key uses for a shotgun mic, I was keen to put the Rycote mics through their paces on voices. There are many different aspects to this, but the ones I was keen to test were overall sound (Rycote describe their mics as ‘precise’ and as having ‘a crisp sound with some additional warmth’) and off-axis response (how coloured is the sound off-axis?).

For this test, I went to a small local theatre (the Sheringham Little Theatre) to use its stage: not a huge sound-treated stage, but a step up from a village hall, and did some tests with the writer (Chris Sainton-Clark) reading excerpts from his one-act play ‘My Other Half’ statically (with the mic on and off axis), and moving about (to see how susceptible the mics are to comb filtering in such a less than ideal interior space). To make it easier to follow the various positions, I have put this test into a video. Oh, and, yes, I know the 180 degrees off-axis test is fairly mad!

Putting the shotgun mics into tougher conditions, I then dragged Chris onto the pavement outside the theatre to ad lib as if for an interview (quite fairly, he chose to promote the theatre where he works!) against the backdrop of the entrance (which houses a bustling café), with noisy traffic and people behind the mic on a busy junction at the centre of the town:

Play it again, Luke

Rarely is a shotgun mic much use in a music studio or, even, for remote location recording of music (e.g. in a church or concert hall), but sometimes the polar pattern of a shotgun mic is necessary. Recording music is also a good test of any mic, so to put the Rycote’s mics to this use I chose to record a guitarist in an indoor non-studio space (a woodcarver’s workshop).

Here are the two mics used to record ‘Moth to a Flame’, written and performed by Luke Chapman. I’ve also included a third version, with the HC-22 paired with an AKG CK94 (i.e. SDC fig 8 mic) to show how the Rycote mics perform as the mid mic and a mid-side stereo pair. The sound is just as it came off the mics, recorded into a Sound Devices MixPre-3.

And here is a short video with clips of Luke Chapman playing the guitar and singing, with the sound (as shown on the screen) switching from HC-15 to HC-22 to HC-22+AKG CK94 mid-side. Again, there is no editing or effects. The limitations of using a single shotgun (even if in one version, combined with a fig 8 side mic) for recording both guitar and vocals simultaneously are evident, and not something I would normally do (in fact, I’m currently recording an album with Luke using three fig 8 LDC mics), but it worked rather better than I thought. And, of course, sometimes a shotgun mic (or shotgun-based mid-side pair) might be an effective solution: e.g. a run-and-gun recording of a busker in a noisy street.

Let’s get physical

While the sound of the mics is the focus of this review, another aspect not clear from the specs is the physical nature of the mic. That is the build quality (insofar that this is clear without dismantling it and using it for years in all conditions), the handling noise (shotguns are forever on the move, at the end of boom poles or on pistol grips), and susceptibility to wind noise.

Build quality seems excellent. With no high-pass filter or pad switches, there are no moving parts to assess, so it’s a simple design. The mix of materials is unusual feeling, but not in a bad way. The brass barrel of the pre-amp (as opposed to the aluminium of the capsule section and interference tube) has a bit of heft (though these are light mics at 90g and 100g): this takes the centre of gravity of the HC-15 a little back from the red ring, and with the HC-22 it is around the paired slots behind the diaphragm. Access to the innards is evidently by release of the brass circlip in the XLR socket, which seems preferable to a screw (the circlip also grounds the mic body to pin 1): I didn’t open up the mics though…The wooden cases are classy, well made and close in a satisfying way (simple pleasures!): not sure many would use them in the field though. More attractive is the lack of gubbins with the mics: no additional equipment means you aren’t paying for things you so often don’t need.

Close-up of the XLR socket with circlip.
How they come: just the mics, the rather lovely cases and the simple cardboard packaging.

Testing for handling noise transmitted via a boompole required some deliberately bad booming aiming for maximum transmission of vibration to the mics (on an Invision 7 suspension). Unsurprisingly the two Rycote mics are pretty similar, with all the unwanted noise below 50Hz (and therefore addressable by a low-cut filter, if not, of course, by better technique). By way of comparison, here are test files for the HC-15, the Oktava MK012 with the hypercardioid capsule, and the AKG CK93 (hypercardioid), which reveal no major differences:

Wind noise on a mic varies with polar pattern, of course, and, while wind protection from a slip-on foam cover, through softies to a full blimp can address the issue, it is good to examine the baseline susceptibility. For this – not least given relevance to actual use – I have just gone for some simple fast boompole swings, with the mics mounted together. The HC-15 and HC-22 are not that different, with the HC-22 (reflecting better rejection of the sides) performing better than the smaller shotgun:

The susceptibility to wind appears pretty normal for a shotgun mic and even lower-cost versions perform well. Here for example, is the HC-22 compared to the Rode NTG1 (levels adjusted to reflect sensitivity), with the latter a bit quieter:

But comparing the Rycote shotguns to other types of boompole mics – in this case hypercardioids – shows a significant difference: even the more wind-susceptible HC-15 easily outperforms the AKG CK93 and, by a huge margin, the Oktava MK012:

Silence is golden

Of the specs the one that immediately stood out to me was the 8.5 dBA (+/- 2 dB) self-noise. This is about as low as it gets for a shotgun mic (think Sennheiser MKH 60 at 8dBA) and is much better than most of the professionals’ favourites. Diaphragm size is a significant factor in mic self-noise, and, while the size isn’t published, Rycote have told me that a 17mm-diameter diaphragm has been used (not bad in a 19mm-diameter mic body). Of course, not all mic manufacturers measure self-noise in the same manner nor is all self-noise the same, so my first test with the mics was to record nothing. Well, as near nothing as possible outside an anechoic chamber or a nuclear bunker: in the hallway of my house in a rural village, I closed all doors, turned off the mains electricity at the consumer unit, and left the two mics recording into a Sound Devices MixPre-3 (EIN -130dBV/-128dBu) along with a Rode NT2-A (at 7dBA in the same ball park). Self-noise was indistinguishable between all three mics. There’s not a lot of value to uploading WAV files showing the slight hiss with gain cranked up wildly, simply to confirm the published spec, but listening to the boompole handling-noise sound samples above makes clear the difference between the Rycote mics and mics with higher self-noise (the AKG CK93 self-noise is 17dBA and the Oktava MK012 self-noise is 18dBA).

Final thoughts

These tests are neither exhaustive nor especially technical: no anechoic chambers or such like were involved. Nor do they rigorously compare the HC-22 and HC-15 to a whole range of other shotgun mics. But the process of carrying out the tests has shown me that Rycote’s first foray into mic design has huge merit: these mics thoroughly deserve to be considered as alternatives to familiar mics above and, indeed, below their price point. The low self-noise and healthy output makes the mics obvious contenders for nature and effects recording; the same attributes, low weight and good off-axis sound make them contenders for film and TV sound; and the same specs/construction for the two models with different interference tube lengths mean that they are ideal if you want to swap seamlessly from one type of shotgun to the other. Having got my hands on them, I certainly don’t want to send them back to Rycote!

Film Projects

‘Of All The Sounds’ – making a short pt. 2

October 6, 2021
Recording sound effects: a passing steam train on the North Norfolk Railway

After shooting the opening, interior, scene for my short three-minute film (an entry into this year’s My Røde Reel competition) – for which see part 1 of this blog post – work on the film moved on to recording sounds (much of the film requires sounds from the 1940s set to film footage of the modern world) and, then, filming outside.

Recording sounds from the 1940s seemed simple enough, and some sounds were relatively easily available. The nearby North Norfolk Railway provided the perfect opportunity to capture a steam locomotive passing by, so I went to the crossing at Kelling Heath to get away from less authentic sounds of modern travellers on the railway. It then just became a case of waiting for the right sounding train to come by, smiling weakly at the passing dog-walkers who – quite reasonably – assumed I was some railway sound-recording enthusiast. To keep things simple and light I used a MS pair in a Rode blimp on a Gitzo boompole.

Some sound effects were relatively straightforward and could be done at home: the click of an old radio being turned on (mono), a door knock (mono), footsteps on a wooden floor (NOS pair) and re-recording sounds (my earlier acoustic recording of Lucy Grubb and a BBC wartime broadcast) via a bluetooth speaker to get a more radio-like sound (mono again). Some sounds seemed as if they would be easy, but were harder to track down: it took a bit of time before I could find a grandfather clock to record ticking away. Recording the sound of a 1940s school playground had its own set of challenges: I could hardly roll up at a school – or walk past repeatedly – with a boompole and blimp without risking arrest. Fortunately, a friend is a teacher and he arranged for me to visit one lunchtime: the kids were fantastic, even obliging with old-fashioned play including hopscotch, skipping and singing Ring-A-Ring-A-Roses. And one of the smallest reception class ones took great delight in extracting small items from my sound bag so he could inspect them. Quite took me back to when our children were that age. Recording the sound of cycling was achieved by clipping two Rode Wireless GO ii TX units to either side of a rucksack, and syncing the two internal recordings with a handclap. The only original sound effect that thwarted me was the sound of a WW2 bomber taking off. The one flying Lancaster in the UK was under repair at Duxford for a year until a couple of weeks ago and then – despite scouring Facebook sites of specialist plane spotters(!) – I couldn’t find any details of its few test flights back at RAF Coningsby before the end of the season for the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight: I didn’t fancy a few four-hour return trips to Lincolnshire on the complete off-chance. So, in the end, I turned to Freesound and used someone else’s excellent recording of two B-25 Mitchell bombers taking off (duly attributed in the film): B-25s were used by the RAF at Foulsham (the former airfield I have used in the film) during the war, so the sound was as authentic as a Lancaster. A bit of editing was required to lose modern voices.

Another exercise between the two main filming shoots was to sort out an authentic-looking headstone for a WW2 pilot. Making a prop with my skill levels seemed unlikely to pass muster, so I photographed some existing war grave headstones in North Norfolk churchyards and, as the Portland stone was quite varied from one to the next, used one of these as the basis to create a headstone to our fictional pilot in Photoshop (i.e. creating a new name, service number, age, date of death etc.): using a couple of locked-off shots for the relevant part of the film would then allow me to mask these into the shot (carefully using the same focal length lens and angle/distance ).

Then it came to the second day of filming: this time outdoors. While there was no dialogue, there were still significant challenges. Above all was the weather: availability of my actors meant the weather had changed to become very autumnal and we ended up with a day with 20 mph wind as well as sunshine (worse still, the latter coming and going as clouds scudded across the sky). Keeping an acceptable exposure and flying a small drone (my DJI Mavic Mini) weren’t as easy as hoped…

Filming with a Lumix G9 on a Zhiyun Crane 2 gimbal: yes, all my shirts are very similar…

And then, finally, to editing in Vegas. I’d already edited most of the first scene, so it was a case of adding the rest of the film, fine-tuning the first scene (mainly adding the sound effects), masking in the faux headstone and, then, assembling a behind-the-scenes film. The latter was a requirement of the My Røde Reel competition and needed to show use of a Røde product (no trouble as I used many Røde mics throughout the filming). I opted for repeating the main film, but in black and white, with picture-in-picture and text overlays to show the behind-the-scenes activities from a technical perspective.

Here’s the final film:

And here’s the behind-the-scenes film: