two wireless lavalieres

[Bruce Watson]

I've got an application for two wireless lavalieres. One on interviewer, one on interviewee, in a crowded marketplace. No room for booms; no budget for them anyway. And, both people need both hands free, so no hand held mics. That would have been too easy anyway ;-)

I want to record them on left and right channels of the camera's stereo input, which uses an unbalanced 3.5mm mini-plug. So I can mix them later during NLE.

My wireless lavaliere is a Sennheiser G2. Works nicely but it pans the sound across both channels equally. So I can't use it (and another of course) directly. I need some kind of tiny field mixer like the BeachTek DXA-2T, but all the small field mixers I can find have just one unbalanced mini-plug input. I need two.

Or... is it possible to convert the unbalanced output from the G2 into XLR, and feed that into something like the little BeachTek? Or, are there little field mixers out there that can handle two unbalanced mini-plug inputs from multiple G2s? Or am I missing something: is there some other (smarter, cleaner, cheaper) way to do this?

I knew I should have paid more attention in that electrical engineering class all those years ago....

[Richard Crowley]

So feed the output from one receiver into the left channel and the other into the right channel. You can do it with adapters/cables from Radio Shack if it comes to that. You don't need a mixer or Beachtek-style adapter for such an application.

If I had to do it from Radio Shack, I would use a stereo 3.5mm mini phone to separate RCA adapter cable like RS 42-494 and a pair of RCA to mini-phone adapters like RS 274-897. Of course if you want a more professional solution you could have a proper cable made up for you.

[Bruce Watson]

I woke up at 5:00 this morning thinking of just such a cable solution. I think all it takes is two female mini-plugs, a male mini-plug, and connect one female mini-plug "tip" to the male mini-plug tip, and the other "ring" to the male mini-plug ring. Shield connects all three.

I'll see if I can find such a cable.

EDIT 1: Found one: http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=43086. Now if I can just find one like that here in the USA that I can get my hands on fairly quickly...

EDIT 2: Got it:

Amazon.com: Cables Unlimited AUD-3010 8-Inch 3.5mm Stereo M to Dual 3.5mm Mono F Splitter: Electronics

 

Amazon.com: Cables Unlimited AUD-3010 8-Inch 3.5mm Stereo M to Dual 3.5mm Mono F Splitter: Electronics

. Thanks all.

[Darrick Vanderwier]

Another solution which is cheap as well if you don't already own a second lav would be to purchase 2 olympus digital voice recorders with lapel mics. I picked up 2 with mics for under 150.00 delivered.
this way you can also capture market noises with the onboard mic to mix in a little in post.
downside is you can't monitor them live but if you run a couple tests you can pretty much guarantee how they will work out when you do shoot.
Sync them up in post and off you go.
You could double mic each person if you wanted to make super sure you are getting audio.
300.00 and many uses in the future for collecting audio.
just my 2 cents.

By the way I bought the olympus 6200pc and love them.
make sure you get one that will let you move the files to a computer though. Some wont do that feature.

[Sam Mendolia]

My two Senn G2s, came with the XLR adapters, which I then plug into the left and the right XLR ports on my Beachtek.

Works very well, as I get two seperate channels on my GL2, which can be seperated in my editing software.

[Bruce Watson]

I ended up with this two mono mini-plug to stereo mini-plug adapter from B&H: hosa ymm-261

Came in this morning with some other stuff. I tried it out and it works perfectly. One mic on one side, the other mic on the other side. I clipped them to my shirt about 15 cm apart and got excellent stereo!

So, problem solved, and inexpensively too. I learn something new every day. :D