Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, IL, just outside of Chicago, makes ample use of Countryman microphones—B6 lavaliers and E6 earsets in particular—in its documentary productions.
Dave Jousma, who serves as coordinator of Audio Visual services at the college, has a background that encompasses documentary production for the television news magazine Primary Focus as well as Terra Nova Films.
“We’ve been using Countryman mics for a good 15 years and we consistently achieve excellent audio quality without the visual distraction that many larger microphones would create,” Jousma says. “First and foremost with any microphone is its audio quality and, in this regard, the E6 is wonderful—it’s very open sounding.
“I particularly like the ability to change the sound with the protective caps,” he continues. “The bright and very bright caps provide additional sibilance for voice intelligibility, making it easy to get just the right sound from the subjects.”
He also points to the Countryman B6 lavalier mic’s low-profile design as being absolutely essential in this type of production work: “The microphone’s small size makes it very easy to hide and the ability to position the mic via the lav clip, inside the collar with the vampire clip, on the chest with surgical tape, or through a button hole makes this microphone incredibly versatile.”
Jousma cites a challenging situation where the B6 proved particularly useful. “I was the sound engineer on a Primary Focus shoot in which the young man we interviewed was in a chest body cast from a motocross motorcycle accident,” he says. “Because of this, there was no place to position the mic. There was nothing to which it could be attached.
“I then noticed that the young man had a full head of dark curly hair, so I decided to run the B6 through his hair and positioned the mic on his forehead, pointing down. This way, the B6 couldn’t be seen in the shot, as it was hidden in his hair. Most significantly, the audio I captured sounded great.”
And, he constrasts the performance of the B6 to a shotgun microphone. “I taught a workshop to the college students and compared a short shotgun microphone, positioned overhead on a boom pole, with the B6 in the hair,” he notes. “The sound was terrific from the B6. We listened to a recording I made and the class favored the sound of the B6. In that case, the audio quality benefitted from the close proximity of the lav, hidden in plain sight and off the chest, where lavs can pick up some low end.”
