I set up my recording gear in the basement today, hoping to be able to record while the others are sleeping. Our house has two floors and a basement, so I figured me playing guitar in the basement shouldn’t disturb anyone sleeping two floors up.
Broken screw
I carried my computer and all the stuff down to the basement, set it all up, and started playing around with microphone placements for recording my acoustic guitar. I move the microphones a bit, play for a while and listen through my headphones, then move the microphone again, maybe adjust the angle a bit, play some more, etc. I lowered one of the microphones and was just tightening the nut that holds the shockmount in place, when suddenly the screw goes *crunch!* and comes off in my hand. What the hell?
The large condensor microphones are quite heavy, you have to tighten the screw fairly hard to keep the whole microphone from slowly bending down, but I wasn’t twisting *that* hard. I was using only one hand to do it! Apparently this cheap piece of @#%& couldn’t take it and just snapped. Great… Now I can’t use both of my large condensor microphones at the same time until I figure out a way to get the broken piece of screw out of the hole and find a screw to replace the broken one. Argh!
If you’re thinking about buying a MXL 57 Shockmount… Don’t. If you do anyway, be careful with the screw!
Ugh, the exact same thing happened to me with the shockmount that came with my MXL R144 Ribbon microphone. As you know, those mics can be heavy too, so you have to tighten them alot for them to stay in place, and I wasn’t even twisting that hard and it busted. Reason being, is that instead of giving us an actual mounting “screw” they gave us a threaded casing filled with cheap pot metal, probably to cut production costs. Everything else about the mount is fine except that :/. And don’t get me wrong, I love my MXL mic, it’s amazing, but they need to step up the quality control on the mounting hardware aspect of their products, because putting pot metal in a mounting screw is a recipe for disaster. You can remedy this quite easily though by just going out to Home Depot, or any other reputable hardware store and buying a threaded screw that fits your mounting bracket.