This is not a mic shootout
Monday, April 27th, 2009 | by matthew mcglynn
It was a Saturday. I had time to kill, having finished an intense 3-week remodel a day early — one day before my family returned from abroad.
Theoretically, the remodel left me with a dedicated home studio space. But in fact this studio-to-be is currently a small untreated room that sounds bad. For now.
So, I set up the large living room (with its 16' cathedral ceiling) for a quick overhead-mic shootout.
What, how else would I spend my Saturday?
I tracked a drum groove seven times, using seven different pairs of OH mics. I exported clips from the DAW and listened intensely. For hours. Repeatedly. Switching between two pairs of headphones on two different amps, and some cosmetically challenged monitors I didn’t have to pay for.
But the test was B-grade at best. I’d recorded the pairs individually rather than all at once, and I couldn’t get around the fact that the performance differences were probably more significant than the difference in the mics.
Meaning, maybe the reason the snare really jammed in that one clip is because I was playing it harder.
But I pressed on, listening and writing, editing the clips and the article too. Surely my results still had some validity, no?
Ultimately, I decided, no. I got to thinking about something Seth Godin wrote a couple weeks ago:
I had, as I do every year, a fools post written and queued up… It was good, not great.
So I posted nothing.
I couldn’t exceed my (or your) expectations, so I posted nothing.
I am really eager to give these mics a proper test, especially the 3-Zigma CHI mics. I’ll tip my hand and say they sound great. I should have a proper test up here soon.
Posted in Microphones | No Comments »