"Stephen Boyke" wrote in message
...
All (well, nearly all) condenser mics need preamplification. You have
preamps on your mixing board, along with phantom power (or else the SM81s
wouldn't work). What model of board do you have. It doesn't sound right
that you can't get enough gain out of the SM81s. Something sounds amiss.

Hey Stephen,
It's the "Alesis 24 studio in a box" board. I now know that the board does
have pre-amps for the mics, and that not all pre-amps increase the level
as much as my board does. I made sure that the attenuation was set to 0
on both SM81's and set both of them to roll the bass off. I can lift the
input
some more (I have room there), but I was afraid to do that just to get
the meters to go green. I've been told that increasing the input of each
mic
at the board (the trim, which I'm assuming is the trim for the pre-amp, is
already nearly wide open) is perfectly acceptable. So, more experimenting
tonight... It's been fun... And, the sound is getting better, so I'm
encouraged
to keep trying to improve it.

If you can think of anything that I'm doing wrong or something that may be
wrong with my setup that would be lower the input coming from the 81's,
I'm all ears. grin

Thanks,

Steven