I’m very new to electronics - particularly for audio, but looking to do high quality multi-channel recording using the Elk hat. I wondered if you had any recommendations for how I’d hook up 4 microphones to the board? The description states the hat has a number of analog inputs, while I can find most of them on the board I’m a little confused about how to link my microphones to them without using additional hardware like a hi-fi berry? (Particularly as I’ve only found Hi-Fi berry’s with one or two inputs - so would need to use multiple - not sure if that’s even possible!).
At the minute I have some standard aux microphones designed for mobile phones/ laptops but am happy to invest in something different if it’d be more practical.
Thanks in advance for any help you can give me here!
Hi Becky and welcome to the forum. It is certainly possible to connect up to 6 microphones to an Elk hat. I don’t know if you have a Blackboard or just the Elkpi hat alone. The blackboard exposes 3.5 mm jacks instead of the pin headers of the Elk hat, making it easier to connect audio devices. Without the Blackboard you would need to use jumper cables and a breadboard, or solder some adapter cables yourself.
I don’t know what type of microphones you have, but it’s likely you also need some kind of preamp, otherwise the volume would likely be too low and sound quality lacking.
With that said, the Elk system is primarily intended for live audio processing with extremely low latency and the recording capabilities out of the box are a limited. For a full fledged recording system you would need to do some coding on your own. If you only want to record multichannel audio for offline processing maybe you are better of with something like the Zoom line of handheld recorders.
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly! That’s all really helpful. I have a zoom microphone but we were looking for something a little more customisation. I’ll look in to your suggestions!