A boy and his… Microphone!

Yeah, I know that is supposed to be a Boy and His Dog, but to the old school radio disk jockey, there are few relationships that were closer and more intimate than the DJ and the studio microphone. The same could be said for a singer and his or her stage microphone but I think the DJ/Microphone relationship is stronger.

You see, the microphone, often called a mic or mike in the business is the first thing that shapes the DJ’s voice into the listener experience. Each microphone has its own “personality” and each one needs to be treated differently. I remember each and every mic that I’ve used over the years.

My first studio microphone was an RCA 77-D at WUSC-AM. In fact it was an identical pair, one in the master control room and one in the production room. I first used the one in the production room to record my “Night Owl Show” that aired for the first time on November 8, 1963. The station was located on the third floor of the Russell House, just a few feet up the same hall where the WUSC-FM is located today. The show was prerecorded so that station could stay on the air later than the closing time of Russell House at 11 PM. The last live DJ of the day would start the tape replay and set the transmitter to turn off when the tape ran out on the reel to reel machine and the tension arm fell to its resting place.

The control room microphones were hung from the ceiling on chains so the DJ had to adjust his or her position in front of the audio board in order to “work” the microphone at a medium range of 6 to 9 inches. The mic was set to a cardioid pattern in order to reject control room noise behind it such as flipping switches and starting turntables and tape machines. In all the stations where I worked, this was the only one where the mic could not be adjusted to the DJ’s size.

RCA 44-D microphones and their brethren, the RCA 44-DX would be around most of my radio days and in fact I still own a pair today. They were shaped like a medicine capsule with a screen encasing the ribbon pick up element that sounded warm and cozy and made a teen aged first timer sound much better than he had a right to.

RCA 44-D microphones followed me to WCOS-AM and FM. There was one attached to an adjustable boom over the Western Electric audio board in the main control room on the second floor of the Cornell Arms Apartments. Another was on another boom over the board out at Doug Broome’s Drive in on Two Notch near Beltline. The ambient noise level was higher there with all the muscle cars driving by in front of the booth trying to get a “varoom” or two on the air. So I worked that mic a lot closer; 3 -6 inches between my mouth and the windscreen with the volume turned down some. You had to be really careful working a 77-D that close because it was easy to “pop” the ribbon when pronouncing P’s and D’s. You quickly learned to turn your head slightly when announcing words with them in order to reduce the “popping” with those words. Today’s microphones are harder to “pop” but if you watch a singer turn their head or move the microphone slightly farther away when singing higher notes or louder passages, you get the idea.

Left: Me and that big old RCA 44-BX at WCOS in 1966. At WCOS I met another of my favorite microphones, it was the older brother of the 77-D, the RCA 44-BX. It was considerably larger than the 77-D, and weighed a lot more. So much more that it usually was set atop the desk stand because few booms could support the weight. When I first met the 44-BX it was the control room microphone in the FM station and I used it as a new hire as the control operator for the Georgia Tech Football games. WCOS-FM carried Georgia Tech back in those days because our morning AM Jock, Bob Fulton was the play by play announcer for Tech before beginning his career as the Voice of the Gamecocks. He used another 44-BX in the production room during the morning show because he did not run his own audio board. There was a third 44-BX at WCOS, this one was on a desk in the FM control room facing the AM studio where Mike Rast would sit while reading the news during the daytime hours.

When I arrived at WIS-TV in 1970 they had a 77-D in the announce booth. But lavalier microphones hung around the “talent’s” neck were the norm in the studio. Later they would become smaller and could be attached to a jacket lapel or a woman’s blouse.

When I arrived at WIS-Radio in ‘76 there was a crowd of 44-Ds there welcoming me back to radio. But by then radio wanted a “brighter” sound and the Sennheiser MD-421 Cardioid Dynamic Microphone was all the rage. It was like night and day, the DJs loved them, me, not so much. But it was not the MD-421’s fault. The problem lay with the new Sennheiser Open Design headphones that everybody wanted. They fit on top of the ear with a bright orange Styrofoam cushion. They were light, comfortable and unfortunately prone to squealing with feedback in a radio environment especially when the DJ loved running his or her sound just below the pain level. I remember many a lengthy discussion of microphones, headphones and loudness. My solution was to hand the complaining DJs a pair of Koss headphones. But you had to have a neck like “The Hulk” to wear those for a five hour shift.

These days the Electro-Voice RE-20/27 line of microphones fill the studios of a great many radio stations. The RE-20 is the microphone in all the control rooms that I’ve worked in during the last 10 years. It is in all the control rooms at WUSC-FM. There are some RE-27 microphones in WGCV, 620 AM and some of her sister stations on Millwood Avenue here in Columbia and I have one in my studios here at Our Generation Radio. These microphones were designed to be worked closely at a range of 1 – 6 inches from windscreen to lips. Some installations have a “pop” screen mounted an inch in front of the microphone. But I find them to be pretty “pop” proof especially when fitted with a Styrofoam wind shield. When worked this close, it is nearly impossible to pick up ambient noise, such as the small electric fan that is constantly running in the WUSC-FM control room to keep the DJ cool and sweat free playing all those hot tunes.

One last thing about the RE-20/27, and all the broadcast engineers and technicians are gonna yell at me for this. When mounted without a shock mount system on a boom, the microphone is 8 ¼ inches long from the stand adaptor to the wind screen. With the microphone right in front of the DJ, it is in the perfect place to GENTLY hang my Sennheiser HD 380 pro headphones when I take them off my head. I can hear the collective gasp from my technical friends but I am very careful doing that. Besides, this practice occasionally brings back an artifact of 70s radio; if I get caught off guard by the sudden ending of a song and I have to open up the microphone and start talking before I put the headphones back on, my shows have been known to include a little feedback squeal. Gotta love live radio. Oh MY!