Picking up crowd noise without picking up conversations

[Pierce_Myles]

I broadcast sports and have a shotgun mic pointed out of our box window with the hope of picking up crowd noise. The problem I'm running in to is I'm picking up conversations that happen in the stands not just noise, is any software that could help me with this or any way to not pick up conversations and just noise

 

[John Hartman]

Have you tried a mic with a wider pickup pattern? Cardioid or super-cardioid would pick up a wider segment of the crowd, but still give you some directionality to avoid nearby seats or equipment.

 

[Pierce_Myles]

Have you tried a mic with a wider pickup pattern? Cardioid or super-cardioid would pick up a wider segment of the crowd, but still give you some directionality to avoid nearby seats or equipment.

Unfortunately we don’t have the funds to purchase anything new, I was looking to see if there was any software options that do the opposite of da noise kinda

 

[John Hartman]

1) You could try adding enough pink noise to mask conversations. For a quick test, you could use something like this 12-hour YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wgg7KtzTrU, bring it into OBS as "desktop audio," and use the OBS mixer to adjust level. There are also pink noise VSTs that might work as OBS plugins.

2) I have seen some claims that covering some of the holes on the side of a shotgun mic will make it less directional. No idea whether that is true, or whether it will also make it sound like cow patties.

3) Are you sure you can't scrounge a mic? We used a Behringer C2 small-diaphragm condenser mic (US$50 for two) as a crowd mic at our church for several years.

For any approach, you might want to apply some EQ for best-sounding results. Our crowd mic picks up a lot of rumble from a nearby freeway, so we cut everything below 100 or 200 Hz since we were interested only in voices. Cut the high end to tame HVAC noise.

 

[AaronD]

Look at the pickup pattern, and imagine that shape in 3D space around the mic. Scale appropriately to make sense to you, so that what's inside that 3D shape is what you hear. Now move that shape around, by moving the mic or changing the pattern, so that it picks up what you want and not what you don't. You might need additional cabling, to have it in a different location, and/or a different mic with a different pattern, or whatever, but that's how you do it.

Unfortunately, lack of budget does not change physics. But likewise, an overabundant budget does not change physics either. Everyone has the same constraints there.

It would probably help too, to have multiple mics in different locations, and mix them all together. Then even if you do get a loud conversation that just happens to sit next to one of them, the others can still drown it out somewhat. But of course you should also try to not have it close to any specific seats in the first place so that it just doesn't happen. Likewise for a super-directional pickup pattern that "reaches out" to some specific seats, even if they're somewhat far away.

 

[AaronD]

...covering some of the holes on the side of a shotgun mic...

Directional mics do indeed use multiple ports to create the directional pattern. It's the same principle as directional subwoofers.

Both subs and (most) mics are too small compared to the wavelength that they work with, for a single aperture to be anything other than omni. So they use multiple apertures that interfere with each other, reinforcing in one direction and cancelling somewhere else.

So for a different example, a rapper that likes to cup the mic is actually destroying the directional pickup pattern by blocking the rear ports, making it omni instead, and *that* can cause a floor wedge to feed back when it wouldn't have otherwise, *even if the mic is pointing away from it*.

As for the sound or tonal quality changing, that's also a possibility. Part of the electro-mechanical-acoustic design of a mic is the frequency response too, and as a passive device, everything affects everything else. Even for a phantom-powered mic that has a pre-preamp built in, it's still passive before that amp, and so a lot of the same things still apply. The built-in amp does give an opportunity for the designers to correct things that are easy to correct electronically, so that the physical design can focus on other things instead, but because that correction is fixed, it still doesn't change the possibility of changing the sound when you mess with the acoustics.

Whether that sound is okay or easily correctable, is another question. You might just have to try it, with a good ear AND a good EQ (OBS's EQ is probably not good enough), and see what you can come up with.