Sennheiser 8060 Review

It’s always good to strive to better yourself, or at least the quality of your work. Here at TV-Bay it’s something we always aim to do. So this year, for our NAB 2012 coverage we wanted to see if we could improve upon our sound recording during the BroadcastShow interviews.
If you don't know, I walk around these shows, camera crew in tow, interviewing people on their booths, and it’s all put up at broadcastshow.com. The problem with these shows is they are busy, and NAB is probably the busiest of them all. With lots of people comes lots of noise, and finding a mic that had excellent off axis rejection, was not too long and of course sounded great was the challenge in hand when selecting our kit before the show.
This is where the Sennheiser 8060 came in. We were kindly loaned one by Sennheiser to test. The 8060 is part of the 8000 series of mics. These mics are modular and you can choose longer or short capsules, namely the 8070 or 8050 and different modules depending on what connectivity you need, e.g.. you could add the MZD 8000 to give you a digital AES 42 output.
However the most impressive thing about this mic is the sound, my goodness it sounds good!! I have used a 416 many times, and it is a lovely mic, but this 8060 just had the sweetest sound.
The super-cardioid pickup pattern means it rejects off axis sound, ideal for what we were doing, but it does it in a really nice subtle way without being harsh and keeping the sounds very natural. The mic itself is very sensitive and at first I would have it too close to the subject before realising that there is no need for this.
The mic does not have any roll off switches so if you want this feature you have to purchase the optional MZF-8000 module which gives you a fixed 3db rolloff at 16hz as well as another 3db rolloff at 160hz
But what it comes down to in the end is sound. The mic is warm, natural sounding, very forgiving if you are not directly on axis and just seems to make everything sound amazing. I was blown away at just how good it coped with off axis sound.
The sound tends to just reduce nicely in volume as you go off axis rather that turn into this horrible tinny sound that you can get with some other mics. During the Show with all the background noise I thought it may struggle but no, it was remarkable at cutting out the surrounding sound. I was actually hand holding it like a reporter with a Sennheiser wireless transmitter on the end, not the normal use of this mic, but it picked up no handling noise at all and as long as I remembered not to stuff it in my mouth like a normal reporters mic, it sounded great!
Overall this is an amazing mic, not cheap, but as they say you get what you pay for. It’s very robust, has great weather proofing and with the small size you can mount on any kind of camera with ease as well of course on a boom pole.
All I can say is if you get a chance to have a go with a Sennheiser 8060 that you do so. I think I will have to add this to my kit, we don’t have a star rating as such that would do this justice but suffice to say it gets 10 out of 10 from us.
Off to tv-bay to sell some old stuff to afford it......