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[Aaron Baxter]

I've not had any experience with this so please forgive my ignorance.  I'm trying to setup a mic in the front of house facing our congregation, however, as far as I can tell even the best shotgun mics are only good up to about 10 feet.

Where my confusion, and questions, comes in is if this is true how can the simple, mic on my cheap camcorder can pickup pick up even voices, 30 feet away?  Mind you ambience is low and there cannot be another voice closer, but it still works.

[Tim Halligan]

Could you be a little more specific about what you're actually trying to achieve?

Are you actually going to put this mic into the PA, or is this for recording a show?

More details yields better answers.

Cheers,
Tim

[Robert Lunceford]

I've not had any experience with this so please forgive my ignorance.  I'm trying to setup a mic in the front of house facing our congregation, however, as far as I can tell even the best shotgun mics are only good up to about 10 feet.

Where my confusion, and questions, comes in is if this is true how can the simple, mic on my cheap camcorder can pickup pick up even voices, 30 feet away?  Mind you ambience is low and there cannot be another voice closer, but it still works.

I use a pair of Crown PCC160 to record the audience at live shows.

[Art Welter]

..as far as I can tell even the best shotgun mics are only good up to about 10 feet.

Where my confusion, and questions, comes in is if this is true how can the simple, mic on my cheap camcorder can pickup pick up even voices, 30 feet away?  Mind you ambience is low and there cannot be another voice closer, but it still works.

Aaron,
It is not true that "shotgun mics are only good up to about 10 feet", they are often used in sporting events and wildlife to pick up detail at long distances.

The narrow pattern of a shotgun mic could be used to isolate a specific area of the audience sound, but the sound of the rest of the audience would be compromised by the comb-filter sound of the out of phase off axis pick up of the interference tube used to achieve the very narrow high frequency pattern.

You want to choose the polar pattern (omni, cardioid, supercardioid, hypercardioid, supercardioid/lobar or hypercardioid/lobar) that best fits your application- whatever it is.

Art

[Craig Hauber]

I've not had any experience with this so please forgive my ignorance.  I'm trying to setup a mic in the front of house facing our congregation, however, as far as I can tell even the best shotgun mics are only good up to about 10 feet.

Where my confusion, and questions, comes in is if this is true how can the simple, mic on my cheap camcorder can pickup pick up even voices, 30 feet away?  Mind you ambience is low and there cannot be another voice closer, but it still works.

Ambient pickup for the in-ears?
Audience response for video recording?
Either way you will pick up the loudest thing in the room first and foremost -the PA!
So you probably will want some basic directionality beyond an omni
I've found pencil type condensers works just fine for this. (KM84, C451 and SM81) and any of the millions of modern variants of these -even the cheap china clones work just fine if you're  not live amplifying their output.
Even a plain-ol '57 has performed this duty for me in the past.

[Dave Pluke]

I'm trying to setup a mic in the front of house facing our congregation...

Assuming you want to capture the congregation for streaming/recording, I've had good luck with cardioid Small Diaphragm Condensers in an X-Y configuration at the rear of the sanctuary (or edge of balcony) facing the altar. As mentioned, they needn't be particularly expensive but be sure to locate them out of HVAC blast range and High Pass them to lessen room noise. A notch may be required at the paper-shuffling frequencies. Experiment.

Dave

[Aaron Baxter]

Ok, the 6-10 ft limit was from sites like audio-technica.

My goal is to face 1 or 2 (if necessary) mics to capture people responding to questions or giving testimonies for recording/streaming.  The room is pretty small for a sanctuary (about 60Wx100L).  My original thought was to have them facing back from FoH, but I hadn't thought of a x/y from the back corners (would make cabling easier).  Corners are the farthest away from HVAC and the central door, but would put one above my head.

The PA won't be emitting anything other than whatever idle noise might exist from them as the speaker will be waiting for response and I have ~65dB noise gates on the mics.

I get that I'll have to be quick on the mute button for them else I'll have some fun echo like I do with the camera's mics.  Wish my DAW was smart enough to do a "subtraction" of 1 mic from the other but I don't see how that would be possible without a significant delay at least.

[Doug Jane]

Ok, the 6-10 ft limit was from sites like audio-technica.

My goal is to face 1 or 2 (if necessary) mics to capture people responding to questions or giving testimonies for recording/streaming.  The room is pretty small for a sanctuary (about 60Wx100L).  My original thought was to have them facing back from FoH, but I hadn't thought of a x/y from the back corners (would make cabling easier).  Corners are the farthest away from HVAC and the central door, but would put one above my head.

The PA won't be emitting anything other than whatever idle noise might exist from them as the speaker will be waiting for response and I have ~65dB noise gates on the mics.

I get that I'll have to be quick on the mute button for them else I'll have some fun echo like I do with the camera's mics.  Wish my DAW was smart enough to do a "subtraction" of 1 mic from the other but I don't see how that would be possible without a significant delay at least.

If you want good audio doing this,you need a couple of wranglers with wireless mikes that can get to the person speaking. Otherwise the audio will sound like some one at the back of the room. Think it through properly. Audio is all about garbage in garbage out.

[Mike Caldwell]

So are you wanting to send these mic to the main PA speakers or just use them as part of a live stream audio feed?
Your response kind of makes me think you want to send those mics to the PA system, bad idea if that is the case.

[Tim McCulloch]

Ok, the 6-10 ft limit was from sites like audio-technica.

My goal is to face 1 or 2 (if necessary) mics to capture people responding to questions or giving testimonies for recording/streaming.  The room is pretty small for a sanctuary (about 60Wx100L).  My original thought was to have them facing back from FoH, but I hadn't thought of a x/y from the back corners (would make cabling easier).  Corners are the farthest away from HVAC and the central door, but would put one above my head.

The PA won't be emitting anything other than whatever idle noise might exist from them as the speaker will be waiting for response and I have ~65dB noise gates on the mics.

I get that I'll have to be quick on the mute button for them else I'll have some fun echo like I do with the camera's mics.  Wish my DAW was smart enough to do a "subtraction" of 1 mic from the other but I don't see how that would be possible without a significant delay at least.

You might have luck with parabolic reflector microphones (sometimes used in sports broadcasting), but getting intelligible speech pickup over distance ain't really gonna happen.  "Shotgun" microphones work by creating acoustic cancellations (the barrel of the 'shotgun' is call and interference tube) to make the spot pickup.  What you get at the diaphragm is the 'left overs', acoustically.

You'll need spotters and mic runners if you want high quality pick up.

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