Microphones Wireless Microphone Elements

[Jammer]

We experience failures with Shure Microphone elements for wireless packs on a regular basis. Understand these may go bad after sometime, but the failure rate we are experiencing seems higher than it should be. We loose a couple of them every week as the show progresses. Some just fail outright, but most just start to degrade and eventually become unusable. Appreciate anyones thoughts, tips or experience with this, as it seems the problem may be more related to perspiration, make-up etc. clogging the element. Are there routine maintenance or storage practices that we can implement to improve the shelf life? Not sure I provided enough info, so feel free to let me know if you need more information.

 

[mbenonis]

Hi Jammer, what mic elements are you using? Also, are you aware that Shure offers flat-rate repair on out-of-warranty mic elements? Information is available at https://www.shure.com/service

 

[Jammer]

Apologies, thought they were from Shure, so original post mis-stated Shure Mic Elements, we are using Countryman B3. We use them with the ULX-D and UR4D Xmitter packs.

 

[Colin]

Ultrasonic jewelry cleaners with distilled water are nice for this.

 

[jkowtko]

B3 caps come off and can probably be cleaned. They are supposed to be waterproof so the cap should prevent the element from getting ruined by sweat. Call the company and see what their repair policy is ... they used to have a decent warranty and also flat rate capsule replacement.

 

[macsound]

Ultrasonic jewelry cleaners with distilled water are nice for this.

Wow really? I don't know how those jewelry cleaners work but that would be an amazing improvement over cleaning manually.

 

[Colin]

Wow really? I don't know how those jewelry cleaners work but that would be an amazing improvement over cleaning manually.

My experience is limited to, some years back, seeing a visiting company do this with theirs (MKEs I'd guess) and then I said "hey can I try that thing?" and put a couple trashy sounding B3s in and it made them sound less trashy without breaking them. I did the cap and the element separately after getting as much goo as possible off the outside, dried thoroughly before use. I can't say it's safe for every mic or what frequency is best and so on, but seems like caps only ought to be safe and some people are definitely tossing the whole mic in there too. It wasn't exactly a magic bullet when I tried it with some very nasty mics, but better than cleaning by hand I thought. Maybe best to do on a regular schedule to stay ahead.

EDIT: Here's a very affordable one offered for our specific purpose: https://bodymics.myshopify.com/products/ma-usc-cleaning-agent-mini-ultrasonic-cleaner