Microphone hell

DPA 4060s at about 10X scale

I noted earlier that we bought the high-end mics our friend Bernie Krause recommended. They're DPA 4060s, for those of you following along at home. Very expensive and exquisitely sensitive. Except, oh, did you want to connect them to anything? Because they're "microdot" and require special bespoke adapters to work. Those are also expensive. Did you want to use them for people moving around on boats, etc., where you can't wire them together? Well then, you need two new micro recorders, and special adapters for those, plus SD memory cards. Did you want regular mini windscreens or dead cat windscreens? Special clothing clips for your microscopic mics so they don't fall off because of course they don't fit with regular ones? Oh, the adaptors don't work. Are you sure you set the recorder for 48V phantom power that must then be stepped down with the special adapters? Let's try different adapters. Huh. Those don't work, either.

Each step of this process required a trip into the heart of Richmond's Iron Triangle to a FedEx pickup site, because otherwise I might never get delivery (see previous FedEx related posts). What is the Iron Triangle? According to U.C. Berkeley's Richmond Confidential, it's one of the most gang-ridden, crime-addled neighborhoods in the nation. Speaking of microphones:

Violence is so pervasive here that [...] the department installed gunshot-detection technology called Shotspotters — a labyrinth of microphones that captures and relays the sounds of gunfire to a high-tech computer system. The technology can pinpoint the location of discharge to the square-foot. On busy nights, more than 10 separate bursts of gunfire can be recorded in the Iron Triangle between midnight and dawn.

How fun is it to park my out-of-place red Maine Subaru in the Iron Triangle and wander around with boxes of super-expensive equipment? My first trip, I came within one inch of being run over by a speeding car and it just got more fun from there.

UPDATE: none of the new equipment works in any combination with my existing equipment and I returned most of it. A relief, frankly. Back to lowly podcaster status for us. We're probably not deserving of such sensitive and fine equipment (truly, it is that - I just couldn't make it work).