Mic Feedback Problems. Urgent Help Requested.

The acoustic coupling is certainly an issue and having your speaker behind or beside you is not helping either (assuming they tops are pointed towards (roughly) the middle of the dancefloor.

I always play behind my speakers, preferable a foot or two minimum.

Second, in mics like in PA, what you get is what you pay for. And that Behringer is practically for free. If you compare it to the 58beta you mentioned it is a whopping 800% more expensive 😀 .

I have had good results with the Rode M1 and it’s about half the price of a 58beta.

There are many tips and tricks to cut feedback, but the only serious one is sounding out your setup before every gig. There are nice little apps that help you determine what frequency bands to turn down. But you’ll need at least a 2x 31-band graphic eq normally. And you’ll be altering all the sound, not just the mic.

Stay away from feedback killers. I know there are some good ones, but that’s pro grade and thus totally unaffordable for the average Joe. The rest is bogus imho.

Supercardoid trumps cardoid when it comes to feedback, unless you move a lot (left to right). Due to the increased sensitivity (smaller area but deeper), it picks up sounds further away from the mic than cardoids (general rule of thumb, I know there are execeptions LOL). It does pay to find out if the feedback is caused at the low end of the frequency scale. If so, getting a simple High Pass filter in between your mic and the mic input could help solve the problem.

Finally and I am not trying to put anybody down, BUT … I have seen plenty of DJs who mimmick their heroes. And those heroes more often than not show up in video clips and such holding the mic with their hand fully cupped around the back half of the windscreen (the metal mesh round part at the top). While this looks really kewl, it has a slight disadvantage, it turns a cardoid mic into a omni mic! Suddenly it picks up sounds from the front as well as from the back. So, be sure that when you are trying to battle feedback you hold your mic correctly, i.e. by it’s body not it’s head.

The more direction, the higher the sensitivity in that area. No matter what mic you pic (nothing wrong with the Sennheisers, just not my brand for (dynamic) mics and imho the Rode M1 (same price as the 835) does sound better, more clarity which is good for speech – which is what we DJs do after all) they all have their own peculiarities. But in the price range you are talking about (say 85-125 euro) the differences won’t be all that big when it comes to pickup patterns, sensitivity and – in your case – feedback problems.

Do you plug your mic into the controller directly or are you using a small PA mixer? In the latter case, you can hit the HPF (High Pass Filter) and get rid of anything under 80-125HZ, depending on the filter settings. That takes care of most of the rumble that can come back from the wall. Then you can use the app, find the frequencies that bother you most and dial those back a bit (since you’ll only EQ your mic channel, you won’t be hurting your overall sound).

The lower the frequency the more omni-directional it is. So getting rid of a lot of the extra low (thank you subs), you end up with the more directional higher frequencies to deal with. And as I explained, here speaker placement is key.

Good luck.