Pathbreaking Microphone Makes Ambisonics Affordable

The Brahma microphone makes the lives of low budget independent filmmakers and  musicians easier.

Finally, an answer to all the sound recordists, musicians and independent filmmaker’s prayers who have been rooting for ambisonics but have not been able to afford it yet. The world of cinema and playback has definitely made that leap, but independent artists have often had to compromise on this front due to the unaffordable prices of equipments. Here is where the Brahma microphone comes into play, useful for sound recording for films, music concerts, playback, nature recordists and any other conceivable need.

The Brahma microphone can virtually generate any microphone pattern

Brahma is a result of the joint efforts of Nakul Sood, an independent filmmaker who has been fashioning ingenious equipments and rigs for DSLRs for some time with his company Embrace, and Umashankar, sound recordist who has been making amplifiers and microphones for over 30 years.

Umashankar felt that ambisonics was the way forward but was at wit’s end how to make it affordable. In came a paper on Ambisonics written by Michael Gerzon and Peter Craven in the 1970’s. Due to technological and price limitations their design had not seen wide-spread use, until now. Umashankar and Sood’s  Brahma microphone is a high quality electrets based, phase accurate ambisonics microphone that captures the true 3-dimensional representation of an acoustical ambiance.  “It’s a single point recording device which lets you generate virtually any microphone pattern in the world. So it allows you to turn your audio in any direction, on any axis without touching the mic as well as create multiple forms of audio images, from mono, stereo, to surround sound with height. For instance, if a plane flew overhead while you were recording, it would sound like a plane flew overhead in playback.” says Sood in a video which introduces the microphone. This means doing away with different microphones which serve different purposes, like a Cardioid, Super Cardioid, Sub Cardioid to Omindirectional, etc.

According to the information made available by Embrace, the Brahma is as versatile in post as during recording. The sound image can be panned, tilted and zoomed. The B-format files can be processed in several different playback formats: mono, stereo, biannual, 4 and 6 sided array, 5.1 surround, 7.1 surround with height, 8 channel surround with height. Brahma Volver and VVMic have been developed to process files recorded via Brahma, but other options are also available.

Dissecting the microphone

Embrace launched a Kickstarter campaign for it and have the pre-order option available for three versions, a stand-alone microphone that can be used with any 4 channel recorder ($649); built into a modified Zoom H2n recorder ($899); and both — a stand-alone coupled with a modified Zoom H2n recorder ($1,399). The H2n recorder is handheld and portable keeping in mind the essence of mobility in independent productions, especially films.