We’re continuing with the Divisional Round of the MCHL Race to the Cup with a single match to help avoid playing during the Independence Day weekend festivities so we’re doing an abbreviated version of the Stanley Cup championship theme we’ll be rocking all week as the Hurricanes barrel toward their parade in downtown Raleigh on Saturday.

But just because we’re only playing one game tonight doesn’t mean there’s not excitement and some shiny new things to play with along with a bit of a mini-theme once the game has finished.

I’ve been experimenting the last couple of games with the Forest rink’s microphone over the 1-MC…first by announcing goals in the two Stanley Cup Finals games taking place during Ironclad matches and lately announcing goals and penalties by request of some of the players.

That was fine on the Forest rink but tonight’s match was on the Wake rink and I’m sure they wouldn’t have minded me borrowing the microphone but I’d been thinking of investing in a microphone of my own so that I don’t have to depend on the rink’s mic.

The holy grail of announcer’s microphones is the Shure SM58 which I’d used at a couple of venues when calling goals for Enloe women’s lacrosse…it’s built like a tank and performs like a dream. I was decidedly less keen on the price tag unless I could find a steal in the used market.

I was lucky to find a couple of pretty cheap microphones at a used musical instruments place and I figured I’d give one of them a test tonight and the other tomorrow night and see which one I prefer (or more accurately, which one comes closest to the super-cardioid pickup pattern and tonal performance of the SM58).

Tonight’s choice is the AKG D2300S and even though it’s the cheaper of the two microphones, it does have the advantage of the switch to allow me to turn it on and off as needed rather than fiddling with the mixer board. That’s nice when you’re going hand-held to avoid the “thump” through the speakers when you set it down though I’ll confess that the few times I forgot about the switch, it seems the capsule is much better in terms of shock-mounting than microphones I’ve used in the past.

This microphone is decidedly different from the one on the Forest rink. For one, it’s a dynamic microphone as opposed to a condenser microphone so it doesn’t need the 48V phantom power…just plug it into the XLR port and up the gain a bit and it’s time to have some fun.

Once I got used to the differences between the AKG and the other microphone in terms of positioning and mixer settings, I have to say that it sounds much better than the Forest microphone and close enough to the SM58 that you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference over the rink’s speaker system.

Not bad for $20! 🙂

I was able to repurpose a hard-shell case with some of the leftover foam from the Pelican-style case that houses the notary seals that fits both of the microphones perfectly and will keep them nice and safe during transport! Yay! 🙂

Game 1 Warm-Ups (Bendis Division 2 v 3)

Post-Game

I had a couple of choices for the mini-theme after the final horn.

The easy choice was Sir Paul McCartney’s birthday in which he turned 84 years young today and he did get a shout-out in the first intermission! 🙂

But tonight’s mini-theme is in memory of the passing of Walter Parazaider who was a member of the woodwind section for the band Chicago.

I would have picked “Colour My World” which really features Walter playing flute but I opted for the more upbeat songs primarily from Chicago 17 which still highlight the woodwinds/brass sections that everyone at the time said would *NEVER* work in a rock-and-roll band but remained a signature feature of Chicago through the decades.

Thank goodness they were dead wrong on that and Walter was an essential element and founding member of Chicago providing such a rich sound to their music who stayed with the band until he retired in 2018.