The Pounder P2
In-Ear Bone Conduction Microphone

(shipping Q1 of 2012)

Overview

Ditch that Thumper collar and move over to a super-discreet ear-piece! Stick it in! The Pounder in-ear bone conduction microphone picks up the lowest frequencies you produce, from the vibrations in your head.

Really? Vibrations In My Head??

Put your fingers in your ears. Now make some kick-drum sounds. Do you hear that? Do you feel the tips of those fingers vibrating? The sound from your throat is vibrating your skull and it travels up your ear canals. The sensitive microphone built into The Pounder picks those sounds up and processes them for use in vocal percussion/beatboxing!

If you're not using in-ear monitors on stage, then The Pounder might be the extra beatboxing mic you're looking for! You could even use it with one in-ear monitor in one ear and The Pounder in the other ear.

Sounds Pretty Simple

We attempted to release The Pounder back in 2001, but the sound quality was pretty weak. Thanks to our new BeatPack architecture, that allows us to craft special DSP programs for our mics, we are able to shape the sound from the in-ear microphone. Think of it like a stealth fighter plane. The angles that make the plane "invisible" make it almost impossible to fly, and computer has to do many complex calculations to keep it up in the air. Similarly, the raw sound that comes out of an in-ear bone conduction microphone is not suitable for live performance, but we've spent many hours programming and testing our DSP to make it sound amazing. How does it work? A bit of processing magic and a lot of experience in how vocal percussionists make their sounds.

Hardware

• Still works with all existing Thumper collar mics and new Pounder in-ear bone conduction mics.
• Now all digital: 24-bit/48khz A/D/A and 56-bit double-precision digital audio processor.
• Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) >98 dB
• Silent push-button mute
• Configurable settings through a series of DIP switches

DSP Software

• Two cascaded 4th-Order Linkwitz-Riley low-pass filters (-48dB/oct each) with corner-frequency.
• Dynamic Bass Enhancement: provides boost that varies with input-signal level (using a variable-Q filter, it dynamically adjusts the amount of boost).
• Automatic Gain Control (AGC) to keep your volume level consistent.
• Can be custom-programmed for each user.