beta87 plosive issue

[Coaster]

last night was day one of a two day bar band weekend. this is one of my very last weekends as a freelance soundperson but that is for another thread. anyway the band rocked and is high caliber but i had one issue thats driving me crazy - the singer insisted on using his own beta87 even though i had my own sm58's for the other three guys to sing backups.

it sounded poor.

i'm familiar with the beta87 and have used it a number of times. the first alarm bell for me is that in a bar situation they tend to feedback faster than an sm58 and the wedge needs quite a bit different eq than normal.  pickup/rejection pattern not withstanding they just seem to want to take off around 160, 800 and 3.5k. well i got those issues under control quickly but the guy kept putting plosives into the rig that were pretty incredible. i had the channel high passed (mixwiz3), the LF shelf dimed off, low mid ripped down halfway at around 120-200 or so, main eq dialed down a bit at 100hz for other issues in the room (real thuddy room), monitor eq (15 band klark) dialed way down below 200, HP, and he still was able to clip the klark. i could see that light 100' across the room light up every time he hit a sever plosive which was several times per song.

so my question is - i've never had THIS issue with a beta87. i know condensers can do this but i havent experienced THIS before. is it just this guy or does he have a bad mic? the sm58's had no issues, needed almost no eq (straight up on channels mostly) and were totally clear whereas the beta87 was muddy, blurry and needed a lot of work to get intelligible.

after an hour of tweaking things the most effective thing i found to get intelligibility was to (ahem - sigh - cough cough) pull 680 on the mains down around -4db. i dont like to do that kind of stuff because there wasnt a system issue there and the FOH speakers didnt need that, but this mic/singer did. after that it cleared up pretty well but i will never post a picture of the monitor eq setting i ended up with.

this is just so out of the ordinary i thought i would share and gain insight. i wish he would have used the sm58 i brought

[Tomm Williams]

It's issues like this that make me scratch my head at times. I often wonder what it is that makes some folks ignore the advice of the guy who knows the system. I did an acoustic event not long ago where a very talented young lady insisted on using her brand new clip-on mic with belt pack pre-amp for her violin. She had never even tested it to see if it worked !!. Fortunately she had no way to wear the pre-amp so she went with my suggestion of one of my really nice sdc's. She then (politely) questioned my positioning of the mic relative to the violin. I explained to her that due to the wedge position, this was an optimum set-up. She came from a recording background and knew nothing of feedback issues. Due to her positive attitude, it was a pleasant exchange of ideas rather than a debate. 

[cappttenron]

Maybe there is a problem with that mic? Like you I like to use the same vocal mics for everyone in the band because it makes controling feedback easier.  I did switch to beta 58s some time ago because it seemed I was able get more gain before feedback.  But before that I had used sm58s for a long time.

[abzurd]

If he ate the mic I could see plosives being more prominent. They certainly are with my SM86 capsule, but nothing obnoxious like you're describing. Maybe he didn't have the windscreen liner in place under the grill. I just ran into this with my bass player. He brought his own mic to the show, an SM58 that looked like it came off a construction site. I could see light coming through the grill an looked closely at the mic... yep no foam. $4 on ebay later he has a new windscreen and grill.

[agedhorse]

Quite possibly counterfeit

[Калина]

 

I recently got a full-blooded American SM58 ..... this radio system for about 10 years , but it has been used once a year ( it belonged to the company that makes sausage and other meat products )

seemingly brand new, but with a small dent on the grill .... at first I was glad such a gift , but when testing it turned out that there is a low hum and feedback occurs , although the microphone sounds fine .... I changed it  capsule BETA58 and SM58( made in Mexico ) , the hum disappeared.

I first encounter with such an unusual injury .... SM58 capsule is very reliable microphone

Maybe your Beta87 got hit on the head....

[liko]

Well, first off it's a supercardioid, so you're dealing with tons of proximity effect. An HPF is really just a fixed shelving control; it might tame the subharmonic thumps (or it might not), but the higher harmonics are also going to be present and the HPF will have progressively less effect even at the second and third-order harmonics of such low-frequency waveforms.

On the low-tech end, I've found that a simple foam windsock does wonders at taming plosives and esses that turn up their noses at my efforts to EQ them. The downside is a mic that looks like an ice cream cone (if you use the universal-fit ones); definitely not the image a rapper or rocker is after, and if the guy's bringing in his own mic he will probably not agree to put a sock on it.

At higher levels of equipment, compression. If for no other reason than to protect the speaker system, set up a simple single-stage compression insert to bring the plosives more in line with the sustained notes. "The squeeze" is nearly universal anymore when the equipment is available; the trick is not making it obvious to the listener what you're doing, by keeping the ratio subtle and the threshold away from the performer's normal dynamic range (either above or below).

[dboomer]

Beta 87/86 have a builtin preamp so you may be clipping the preamp itself.  I don't think there is a way to avoid it except to back away from the capsule.

 

You can't really "clip" a dynamic mic until you actually drive the voicecoil out of the gap.  What does happen is that become non-linear but they don't really clip.

[Pro Sound Guy]

Not to be confused with a mic clip