The RODE mics are very good. I have a friend who has replaced a fairly expensive AKG condenser with an NT100. He says the NT100 is better. I wanted a couple of cheap condensers to start with so I bought the Marshall MXL2003 and MXL603 pair from Musician's Friend for $155 US. I think MF quit selling them but American Musical Supply has the pair for $170 US. They turned out to be much better than I thought. You can hear a recording of some rockabilly that was done using the Marshall's for drum overheads at http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/fuzzy2.html. I also use them for vocals and acoustic guitar - http://myweb.cableone.net/eviltwin69/destiny.mp3. If you want to spend a bit more money, one of the engineers in a TapeOp interview said he had just purchased a Marshall MXL V69 tube condenser and was very happy with it. These go for $300 at AMS. BTW, the warm thing isn't empty. There have been a couple of good papers on it (by EEs). Most of it has to do with the property of tubes when they are overdriven. You can do a web search and find a lot of information. Jan On Tue, 2004-08-03 at 15:43, Alastair Couper wrote: > Yes, I should state the intention. I have a SM58 knockoff (by Fender) that > I use on hand drums. My interest de jeur is to record a female vocalist. > > I am an electrical engineer by education, so am amenable to freq charts, > THD, spatial plots and such. But the "warm" thing seems to me empty. Seems > like judicious EQ should get you what you want, given that the transducer > is coming up with a clean reproduction to begin with. But then one gets > into subjectivity and black magic again. > > I am looking a Studio Projects B1, for instance. > >
