In this guide: What a gooseneck mic is · Base, shaft, capsule · Stem length and feedback · Mounting options · Three system topologies · Automatic mic mixers · Loudspeakers and intelligibility · Recording and hybrid meetings · Hearing accessibility · Practicalities · Common mistakes · Popular picks · FAQ

What a gooseneck microphone actually is

A gooseneck microphone is a miniature condenser capsule on a flexible metal stem, terminating in a connector or a base that sits on a table or passes through a panel. The flexibility lets each person aim a microphone at their own mouth from a fixed mounting point, and the next person aim it somewhere else, without anyone touching a mic stand.

Being a condenser, it needs phantom power from the mixer, preamp or discussion-system interface. The figures are consistent across the ranges we hold: Shure’s Microflex MX412 and MX418 specify 11 to 52 V DC at 8.0 mA, Centraverse CVG goosenecks the same range at 2.0 mA, and the Audio-Technica U857QL 11 to 52 V. A channel with phantom switched off is the commonest reason a new gooseneck appears dead.

Conference goosenecks are almost always directional, in cardioid, supercardioid or hypercardioid, so they favour the person in front and reject the room and neighbouring talkers. Cardioid is the general-purpose choice; the tighter patterns narrow the front lobe at the cost of a rear lobe that must not point at a loudspeaker. Most also carry a mute switch and a status ring or LED, and the model suffix tells you which: the Centraverse CVG18 is preamp only, the CVG18S adds mute switch plus LED, the CVG18RS a light ring too.

The modular idea: base, shaft, capsule

A “gooseneck microphone” is often not one product but three separable parts:

• The capsule or cartridge. Shure’s Microflex cartridges are interchangeable across the range, and Audio-Technica offers interchangeable elements for the U857 series in omnidirectional, hypercardioid and UniLine patterns alongside the standard cardioid (120 degree angle of acceptance).
• The gooseneck or shaft. The flexible stem, in a range of lengths, sometimes with two flex sections so aim and height can be set independently.
• The base or mount. A weighted table stand, a shock-mounted flange, a panel connector, or a delegate unit within a discussion system.

Hence the codes ending in /N: no cartridge supplied, for buyers who specify the pattern separately. Order one by accident and you get a stem with nothing on the end.

Stem length, working distance and gain before feedback

Stem length is the specification people get wrong most often, and it is not cosmetic. Halving the distance from mouth to capsule roughly doubles the wanted signal, while the ventilation, the shuffled papers and the sound coming back out of the loudspeakers all stay where they are. That improved ratio is what buys gain before feedback: the amplification you can apply before the system rings, as our small venue PA guide also covers.

A stem that is too short is the classic council chamber failure. On a desk in front of a seated person it leaves the capsule among the papers, well below the mouth. The operator compensates with gain, the room starts to ring, someone pulls the level back, and the public gallery cannot hear. Nothing downstream fixes it, because the problem is at the capsule.

So take the longer stem in each range for seated positions at a table or bench, and a mid-length stem for a lectern. Stock spans the useful spread, from Audio-Technica’s PRO49Q at 322 mm to the U857QLU at 603 mm, with Microflex and Centraverse goosenecks in 12 inch and 18 inch versions. Very long stems are intrusive on camera and sag if the base is underweighted.

Mounting: table-top, flush, or delegate unit

Table-top bases. A weighted desk base with a female XLR on top and a male XLR out of the back can carry the mute switch and LED, so the microphone itself stays simple. Choose it for rooms that get reconfigured and for hire stock.

Flush and panel mount. For a permanent chamber or fitted boardroom table, the microphone goes into the furniture: a hole is cut, a shock mount and flange fitted, and the cabling disappears below. Tidy and tamper-resistant, but permanent, so settle the seating plan before the joiner starts.

Chairman and delegate units. Self-contained units combining gooseneck, talk button, status ring and the electronics to link to the next unit: the building blocks of a discussion system, covered next.

Three ways to build the system

A: goosenecks into a mixer with automatic mic mixing

Individual goosenecks, one balanced cable each, back to a mixer or install DSP providing phantom power, gain, EQ and automatic mic mixing. Any microphone can go anywhere, and the same mixer feeds the room loudspeakers, the recording, the streaming encoder and the assistive listening system. Choose it when the room must do more than run meetings, such as a school hall that hosts performances. The cost is one cable run per position and proper commissioning.

B: a dedicated discussion system

A discussion system daisy-chains a chairman unit and delegate units on a single cable run back to a central interface supplying power and audio output. The Apart MDS system we stock is representative: a chairman unit and up to nineteen delegate units, linked with standard Cat5 in a loop of up to twenty units. When the chairman presses the priority button, only the chairman unit stays active and every delegate is muted: a means of restoring order that needs no operator, which is what sells these to committee rooms. One cable instead of twenty home runs can also make a listed building viable. The trade-off: adding a lectern mic or a music input usually means bolting a conventional mixer onto its output.

C: wireless table-top transmitters

Where cabling genuinely cannot be run, table-top transmitters put the gooseneck or boundary microphone on a battery-powered base that radios back to a rack receiver. Treat it as a last resort, because you inherit battery discipline, RF coordination and licensing. Systems in the UHF TV bands need the correct licence arrangement, which our Channel 38 licensing guide explains, while DECT-based 1.9 GHz speech platforms avoid the TV bands entirely. See also our wireless buying guide.

Automatic mic mixers, and why they matter

Every open microphone contributes not just its talker but the whole room, including the sound of the loudspeakers. Add microphones and you add all of that again, yet the wanted signal only ever comes from one at a time. The rule of thumb is that every doubling of the number of open microphones costs about 3 dB of gain before feedback, which is why a room that behaved perfectly with two microphones open starts ringing with sixteen.

An automatic microphone mixer (AMM, or automixer) keeps the number of effectively open microphones as low as possible, continuously and without an operator, by one of two established methods:

• Gating. Noise gates pass only channels with active speech and keep inactive channels out of the mix entirely. Simple and effective, but the gate must decide what counts as speech, so setup matters and audible artefacts are possible at the transitions.
• Gain sharing. Total system gain is held constant, and each channel is attenuated by an amount in decibels equal to the difference between that channel’s level and the sum of all channel levels. The loudest channel ends up with almost no attenuation while quiet channels are pushed well down, continuously rather than in steps.

On top of either method sits NOM attenuation, where NOM is Number Of Open Mics. The automixer counts how many channels are genuinely active and pulls overall gain down following minus 10 log(NOM): roughly 3 dB for every doubling of active channels, so four active channels are attenuated by about 6 dB. That is the loss described above, applied in reverse, deliberately, so total gain stays constant however many people are talking.

If more than about four microphones can be open at once, specify automatic mic mixing, and check it is actually configured rather than merely present in the DSP. Our amplifier matching guide covers gain structure.

Loudspeakers and speech intelligibility in hard rooms

Council chambers, school halls and churches share an acoustic problem: hard reflective plaster, stone, glass and polished timber, with very little absorption. Sound arrives at the listener several times, direct then reflected, and the reflections smear consonants into each other. That is what poor intelligibility is. It is not a lack of volume, and turning the system up makes it worse.

The strategy that works is to get as much sound as possible arriving directly at the listeners and as little as possible at the hard surfaces. Distributed ceiling loudspeakers put many small sources overhead, each covering a modest area at a low level close to the listeners beneath it, which suits low or suspended ceilings and high vaulted spaces poorly. Column loudspeakers stack drivers vertically in a tall narrow enclosure, giving wide horizontal coverage and tight vertical control, so they can be aimed at the seated audience while putting little energy into the ceiling and rear wall. In a reverberant hall or church that is exactly what you want, and they mount discreetly on a pillar.

Whichever you choose, one rule overrides everything: keep loudspeakers out of the microphones’ pickup. They belong behind or above the microphone positions, aimed at the listeners, never in front of an open microphone, and a supercardioid or hypercardioid has a rear lobe that must not contain a loudspeaker either. See also our active versus passive guide.

Recording, streaming and hybrid meetings

Most public-sector rooms now do three jobs with the same microphones, and those jobs want different feeds. The room feed deliberately does not carry every microphone at full level everywhere, because that is what causes feedback. The record and stream feed wants every microphone cleanly, at consistent level, without the loudspeaker processing. A single output split three ways is the usual cause of a recording where half the speakers are inaudible.

Hybrid meetings add a harder requirement. When a remote participant’s voice comes out of the room loudspeakers, the room microphones pick it up and send it straight back, so the remote participant hears themselves delayed. Fixing that is the job of acoustic echo cancellation, which continuously estimates the acoustic path between the loudspeaker playing the far-end signal and the near-end microphone and subtracts that estimate, removing the far-end voice before it is sent back. It must be present at both ends of the call. Crucially, AEC is a function of dedicated conferencing DSP: an installation processor, a conferencing appliance, or the software client. Goosenecks, a discussion system and a general live-sound mixer do not provide it, so treat conferencing DSP as its own line item and confirm its capability against the manufacturer’s documentation.

Hearing accessibility is not optional

If the public or service users are present, hearing accessibility has to be part of the design, not a later upgrade. The Equality Act 2010 requires service providers and public bodies to make reasonable adjustments so that disabled people are not put at a substantial disadvantage, and section 20 sets out that the duty covers provisions, criteria and practices; physical features; and auxiliary aids and services. A hearing loop is one of the standard examples of an auxiliary aid, and the RNID names hearing loops explicitly in those terms. For service providers the duty is anticipatory: plan ahead for disabled people generally, rather than reacting when someone asks. Approved Document M calls for a hearing enhancement system such as an induction loop at reception points and in rooms designed for meetings, lectures, classes and performances, and BS 8300 requires loops to conform to BS 7594 and BS EN 60118-4.

Loops are not the only option: infrared and RF assistive listening systems and networked streaming to personal devices are all in use. But no assistive listening system can recover speech the microphones never captured cleanly.

Practicalities that decide whether the room works

• Cable management in the furniture. Decide early whether cables run inside the table, through a floor box or in trunking, and get it into the joinery drawings. Cable sharing a route with mains will pick up hum. Our connectors guide covers balancing.
• Mute discipline. Muted by default, unmuted to speak. Automatic mic mixing limits the damage from an unattended live microphone but will not stop a private conversation being broadcast and minuted.
• Spare capsules and stems. Two spare capsules per pattern in use and one spare stem per length. Matching a discontinued pattern in three years is far worse.
• Shock mounts and windshields. Table-mounted microphones pick up knocks, laptops and pens through the structure, and a shock mount is the fix. Windshields get lost, so buy extra.
• Commission the room, not the rack. Set gains, automixer thresholds and loudspeaker levels with people in the actual chairs and the ventilation running. Label positions on the base to match the mixer channel and the seating plan.

Common mistakes

• Many open microphones and no automatic mic mixing. Every doubling of open mics costs roughly 3 dB of gain before feedback, so a room that worked with four will not work with sixteen.
• Microphones too far from the talker, usually because the stem is too short. A short gooseneck on a seated desk position leaves the capsule among the papers, and no processing recovers what it never captured.
• Loudspeakers aimed into the microphones. Feedback is a loop and geometry is the easiest place to break it. Never into the rear lobe of a supercardioid or hypercardioid.
• No mute discipline. Unmanaged live microphones cause feedback and embarrassment, and in a streamed meeting the consequences last.
• Assuming a background music system delivers speech intelligibility. It was designed for neither.
• Treating hearing accessibility as phase two. The duty is anticipatory, and retrofitting an AFILS into a finished chamber costs far more than designing it in.

Popular picks from the shop

Frequently asked questions

Do gooseneck microphones need phantom power?

Yes, they are condensers. The ranges we hold quote 11 to 52 V DC: Microflex MX412 and MX418 at 8.0 mA, Centraverse CVG at 2.0 mA, U857QL at 11 to 52 V. If a new gooseneck seems dead, check phantom is on for that channel.

What length gooseneck do I need for a council chamber or committee table?

For seated positions, take the longer stem in whichever range you are buying, so the capsule reaches up towards the mouth rather than sitting among the papers. Standing lectern positions want a mid-length stem. Our stock spans roughly 300 mm to 600 mm.

What does an automatic mic mixer do, and do I need one?

It reduces the number of effectively open microphones at any instant, by gating or by gain sharing, and applies NOM attenuation of about minus 10 log(NOM) so total gain stays constant as more people speak. If more than about four microphones can be open at once, yes.

What is the difference between a discussion system and goosenecks into a mixer?

A discussion system daisy-chains chairman and delegate units on one cable run, with chairman priority in hardware. Goosenecks into a mixer need a cable per position, but give you open architecture and separate feeds.

Do we legally have to fit a hearing loop, and can we install it ourselves?

The Equality Act 2010 requires reasonable adjustments including auxiliary aids, and a hearing loop is a standard example; the duty is anticipatory. What counts as reasonable depends on the organisation and circumstances, so take specialist advice, and do not install one yourself: an AFILS must meet the measured field strength requirements of BS EN 60118-4, and an unmeasured loop can appear to work while failing the people who depend on it.

Where does acoustic echo cancellation come from for hybrid meetings?

Dedicated conferencing DSP, present at both ends of the call. Goosenecks, a discussion system and a general live-sound mixer do not provide it.