I recently bought SM4, because "why not", and I have trouble connecting it.

I connected FetHead to my Audient ID4, and to FetHead I connected the microphone.

The problem is that all the microphone outputs is noise.



And yea, yea I don't have arm, don't laugh. What is broken?

 

The ID4 shouldn't need a fethead for dynamic mics. I would start with taking it off and trying a different cable.

Edit: the SM4 is a condenser mic... So take away the fethead.

 

I apologize for my lack of knowledge but the offer description said that it "requires phantom power" to work, and I associate phantom power with gain increment (fethead/cloudlifter) - that isn't correct, right?..

I unplugged it and it DOES work but I still don't understand, can you/someone explain please?

 

The fethead is an inline preamp that takes phantom power and converts it to a number of clean decibels of gain (depends on the model/brand for how much it can convert). The purpose of an inline preamp like this is to give gain to dynamic microphones when connected to underpowered interfaces that can't deliver clean gain. Dynamic mics take more gain, thus driving the interface preamps create noise, so the fethead and the likes of it were created to solve this problem and give people more headroom before replacing the interface.

The SM4 is a condenser microphone, so it needs phantom power. If the fethead is connected, the phantom power goes away and becomes clean gain, which is not what you need to power the microphone.

There are two problems with your setup:
1- a Fethead is only useful for dynamic microphones
2- the Audient ID4 already has enough gain and a pristine clean preamp that is enough for gain hungry dynamic mics (such as the SM7B). So, a fethead is redundant. It won't harm the signal, but it won't improve anything. A lot of people think that increasing the gain on the interface is a bad thing, but it's only bad if the preamps get noisy, which is something that won't happen on this interface.