External mic + pre-amp ?

[Papi]

Hi,

I'll soon receive my Cowon S9, and besides listening to music, I intend to use it to record some of my teacher's piano sessions, using an electret microphone (Sony ECM 717). I also ordered the line-in cable.

After some research, and if I understood correctly, my microphone being passive, and since the Cowon doesn't have, like most DAP these days, a microphone input, I need a some sort of pre-amp that would also power the microphone.

I 'm not too sure about which pre-amp would do that, I mean power the microphone, so I wondered if anyone has a similar setup, and could give me some advice.

[gazmono]

I am dissapointed there have been no replies. I am looking into this too.I want to use it to record binauraly. Will keep you posted.

[WalkGood]

Originally Posted by gazmono

I am dissapointed there have been no replies. I am looking into this too.I want to use it to record binauraly. Will keep you posted.

Not sure if you have the mikes, but you may want to read this article on "Binaural In Depth," especially the section on "You Can Do it Yourself."

[Papi]

As a beginning of an answer, I've read a review of an owner of some other DAP with just a line-in input, and he said the archos microphone preamplifier (sold with it's little electret microphone plugged in on a jack connector, 30 € here) does his job pretty well.
He also says the microphone is crappy, but they don't sell the preamplifier alone.

It has pretty bad reviews on amazon.com though, so I don't know. It work's with only one LR6 battery, so I guess it can't do much amplification, especially if it's supposed to also power the mic (or maybe the mic can be powered with it's own small battery like the ECM 717).

Anyway I think I'll try that solution, seeing the only alternatives I saw are from http:/www.soundprofessionals.com/ and are not that cheap. Another way would be to use a headphone amp I guess, and power the mic with the included battery.

I'll post a review / recording anyway once I find something that works.

[gazmono]

I have already made recordings in binaural with great success using a mini-disc recorder, but would like to use my cowon coz I always have the cowon with me anyway and MD has disavantages such as needing to carry discs around, difficulty getting the recordings into a computer, mechanical fragility, and having to wait for the machine to write to disc and make 'table of contents' all the time.
I want a really good pre-amp because from what I hear this makes an enormous difference to the quality of the recorded sound, so I won't bother with the Archos pre-amp.
The good commercialy available ones cost a fortune (unless you know different) so I am looking into making my own pre-amp using circuits available on the web.
I will let you know how it turns out. I May even make some to sell to other interested people.

[Papi]

Yep, I finally built the preampli myself too (with the help of my wife I have to say), using one of the billions of schematics you can find on the internet. I don't know much about electronic, all I know is it's pretty cheap (less than 10€), it's built around the NE5532 aop which seems pretty popular for mic preamps. I also made a stereo mic with 1€ electret caps, the overall result is pretty good.

Gazmono, did you build your binaural mic yourself ? If so, what material did you use ?

[ksmj]

hi,

can you please share info on how you build your preamp?
schematics, photos, component list etc will be appreciated.


cheers

Kelvin

[skip252]

Welcome to ABi

Please note the date on the threads you reopen. No one has posted in this thread in over 18 months. The last time any of the members that participated in this thread, except WalkGood, was active has been close to a year. You can check that by clicking on that members name and looking at their public profile.

The person that built the preamp, Papi, hasn't been active since 03-29-2010. Unless they have email notification active it's likely they'll never see your post.

[Creuz]

Hi, I can chime in with a suggestion.
I use an old Pioneer SK31 cassette boom box to record jam sessions with my S9. I Set the tape recorder to pause / record, then plug the S9's line in to the headphone jack of the boombox - and monitor with a pair of headphones plugged into the S9.
There's several advantages to this: The automatic level control on the SK31 keeps the Cowon from distorting at peak levels and I can use the bass, treble, balance, & volume level controls to tweak the sound quality, plus quality vintage boomboxes are easy to come by. I have the volume on my blaster set to 10 o'clock, and the Cowon input volume set to 3.
It works great and I will post a link to some recording samples if anyone wants.
Cheers
Rick