We headed out to the San Gorgonio Pass wind farm outside Palm Springs in California and as there was some heavy wind blowing we decided to stop and test out just how much dynamic range we could reclaim for our DPA 4018C Supercardioid using The Spacer Bubble.
What We Used
We used the DPA 4018C Supercardioid plugged into our Sound Devices MixPre 3 and tested it on a boom naked, with the Spacer Bubble Base, and with The Long-Haired Fur Cover.
The DPA 4018C is a powerful little mic that boasts a very smooth frequency response, low noise floor and excellent dynamic range performance. Its primary uses would usually be for indoor booming and as a plant mic, though we wanted to see how it would fare in windy conditions, and as usual we needed to push things to the limit.
With no wind protection the limiters on the MixPre3 were engaged hard, pretty much constantly, leaving very little dynamic range for speech intelligibility. It is impressive what even using The Spacer Bubble's base can reclaim in terms of dynamic range, dropping the wind noise floor down, out of the way and allowing Poul to be understood.
Adding the Long-Haired Fur Cover definitely brought the noise in the lower frequency ranges down considerably, making for a much nicer listening experiece and greater intelligibility overall.
Find out more about the Spacer Bubble here.
