Has anyone ever used a speaker as a mic?

[joaquins]

  I've used, as many, a speaker as mic for the kick, helps a lot to catch the depth and use another mic for the rest of the sound, not much trouble to amplify it, a conventional SS transformerless preamp did a reasonable work with it and didn't have troubles with noise as it was LPF at a low freq... I have an 8" cheap speaker for that and does the trick just nice.

  As for voice I'm not sure, a headphone seems reasonable test to do...  You could try with anything you want, but maybe as a second mic, to do some artistic track, more than a hifi solution.

JS

 

[Khron]

I've used an ancient Hitachi speaker my dad found in a dumpster (when taking out the trash), as a subkick on my last two drum sessions. Sealed box, paper-cone 8" woofer and 2" tweeter. Hard-wired a male XLR to it, job done.

Signal level was most definitely NOT an issue - even with the -20dB pad engaged, the peak levels into my MOTU 896mk3 were not too far from clipping

 

[Zebra_PD]

We have two DIY SUB bas mics built from speakers in our studio. One similar to the one built with a kids drum posted earlier and one out of a Harman Kardon Soundsticks subwoofer. It looks really cool and the clients always have a amused look when we pull them out. But they get the job done and we have produced a lot, to my ears, really good sounding drum recordings though the years

Haha on a similar note, as a kid a use to sneak a small microphone under my pillow to use it as as speaker to listen to radio without my parents finding out past bedtime. It was one of those extremely cheap ones that came with recordplayers in the 70s

 

[Zebra_PD]

Of as this crazy guy who builds a mic out of a old hard disk  ;D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AjnHXERRqk

 

[CJ]

tried a bunch of speakers,  best one turned out to be a mini sub wolffer for a computer system,  placed in  front the bass drum vent hole, it picks up a lot of energy as it is about the same size as the hole in the front skin. 

and then we stuck a little 24 VAC pwr xmr used in reverse to get even more level.  this,working with a 57 near the impact zone on the front skin for definition, and a Sennheiser inside the drum, gets you 3 frequencies to mix,  Those are chess moves on the bass plate, wtf?  ???

OT: if your Les Paul has pickup covers, you can shout into those and hear yourself thru the amp,