Shopping Trip: The Rebirth of the B&H Mic Room

MIDTOWN, MANHATTAN: Not unlike slipping into a well-tailored suit, trying on a microphone is a personal experience. At the well-known NYC pro audio/photo/video retailer B&H, the evolution of finding a better fit for the ears has just opened up.

The remaking of the B&H Mic Room was part intuition, part engineering.

Known simply as “The Mic Room”, B&H’s acoustically isolated space for auditioning mics, located within the sprawling pro audio section, has been available to the West Side store’s visitors for some time.

But John Pace, Pro Audio Sales Manager, and Keith Cenname, Display Merchandising, of B&H, recently took a fresh perspective on the well-worn room and decided it was time to ramp things up, a move made in concert with a new layout for the pro audio sales floor.

“The redesign of the mic room was motivated by two things that we found troubling: the acoustics and the aesthetics,” Pace explains. “From an acoustic standpoint, the old mic room was basically an anechoic chamber — this is not terribly conducive to microphone evaluation in the real world. And from an aesthetic point of view we wanted a space that would be inviting to our customers.

“The end result we were looking for was a space that our customers could come into, and try numerous microphones and pre amps to find what was right for them. We wanted to create an atmosphere that was inviting and promoted experimentation, with as much — or as little — help as our customers may require from our Sales Professionals.”

Crossfade to White

The original Mic Room was sucking up light and the sound due to an overabundance of black acoustical foam. To simplify the room and bring it back to basics, Cenname and Pace stripped it down, painted it white and added enough acoustical treatment to minimize reflections while still maintaining a desirable amount of ambient quality.

For a generation of buyers accustomed to clicking for more information, going through the keycard-protected door – only one customer is accommodated inside the soundproofed space at a time – the view from inside the airy new mic room is expansive. Mounted on two tiers per side, an array of 60 large diaphragm condenser microphones are plugged in and ready to get a test spin through headphones. 26 different mic pres are also in the highly flexible signal path.

Up close on the setiup.

“It’s possible to try any combination of microphone and pre amp to see what works best — this is accomplished by using a Bantam patch bay that affords the listener a very clean, noise-free signal without any coloration in the signal path,” Pace says. “We have vocalists, VO artists, and musicians all come in to see what mic or pre amp is most suitable for their needs. In addition we have a very extensive line of shotgun microphones, for video users, on display that can all be tested in the Mic Room as well.

“Acoustically, the room is both live and accurate, so people can discern the subtleties of each microphone and pre amp,” he continues. “Every microphone has its own sound or personality unique unto itself — whether it’s warm, bright or roomy, all of these qualities become quite apparent to the listener the moment they start to switch between different models and manufacturers.”

Flexible Connections

While the basic concept seems simple – allow any microphone to be auditioned through any mic pre – there was a significant amount of engineering expertise required to make switching sources an accurate and seamless experience for customers, who are invited to take as much time as they need inside the space and fly it solo if they wish.

Multiple mic pres are in the mix.

“The technical approach to the design was to insure that the signal would be clean, quiet and void of any external coloration,” states Pace, “the objective being that the listener can discern all the sonic nuances of the mic or pre amp intended by the manufacturer.

“In order to accomplish this there was only one way to go: A Bantam patch bay, just as you would find in any large-format analog console. This would give us both the flexibility we required, and the low noise floor/lack of coloration that might be induced by selecting another type of switcher.”

If there’s anything about the online shopping experience that the B&H mic room does evoke, it’s the feeling of having a dizzying array of choices at your fingertips. Imagine being able to instantly audition $80-$4,000 mics from the likes of Shure, Neumann, Audio-Technica, AKG, sElectronics, Sennheiser, Rode, Blue, CAD, Cascade and more (any mic can be brought in on request), via mic pres such as Grace Designs, Focusrite, Universal Audio, Avalon, Behringer, ART, Nady, PreSonus, dbx, Studio Projects. The possible combinations may not be infinite, but they could certainly take some time for a serious listener to sort through.

Completed just in time for Black Friday and the accompanying season, the effort to re-engineer this interactive, Swiss Army Knife of a microphone home appears to have paid off.

“The room is constantly in use by our customers, and to my knowledge there’s nothing like it anywhere in a retail environment,” Pace says. “Outside of a world class recording studio, you wouldn’t find the variety of microphones and pre amps accessible to our customers all in one place — not to mention you can try every single one. We haven’t even started to get the word out, and customers are coming into the store asking ‘Where’s the mic room?’”

— David Weiss

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