On Tue, 2011-06-14 at 21:06 +0000, Fons Adriaensen wrote: > On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 03:23:47PM +0200, Cedric Roux wrote: > > > I liked the very end, about adding an EQ to a (as far as I understood) > > cheap microphone and get the same sound than a more expensive one. > > Funny. > > It's true, as long as we talking about just on-axis FR differences. > > What sets a quality mic apart are things like > > - noise level, > - off-axis frequency response, > - absence of FR errors that can't be EQ'd easily, > e.g. high-Q resonances, > - RFI rejection, > - quality of construction and materials, > - accurate and complete specs. > > The first two really matter when a mic is not used for a single > instrument or voice, but for a complete orchestra, ensemble or > section of an orchestra. > > Consider a mic used as part of e.g. an ORTF stereo pair for > a classical music recording. It has to pick up the complete > orchestra plus room sound - from all directions, not just > front - with the same good frequency response. Levels can > be easily more than 60 dB down compared to what's seen > by a solo mic. For this sort of thing you need the star > names. > > For once I'd agree with Ralf that there are some things you > can't fix with EQ. > > > (I don't claim expensive mikes are useless, it's all about noise > > at this point I guess, for what I understand about this business...) > > Anyway, thanks for this link, it was very instructive. > > Yes, some good myth-busting. > > Ciao, > FWIW those microphones among other things are that expensive because there's much failures for the capsules. The directional characteristic for large-membrane microphones is set by the amount of the level for the front and backside. For a Neumann and Brauner a capsule's front and backside is as equal as possible. If a capsule hasn't very similar front and back sides they still can be used for cheaper microphones, that e.g. just need a front, but no backside. You can assume that for less expensive microphones they use every capsule without making a selection. For expensive microphones they take care for nearly everything, even the transformer plates are important. The only thing they do not, is selecting semiconductors. Some people build custom versions of famous microphones, with selected semiconductors and voodoo cables. We compared those custom microphones with the standard versions and there was no difference. Just the tubes are important. No china ware! If you take a look at the capsules you will see differences for the wholes. Some vendors do long time trial and error development regarding to this and others just use capsules with no-matter-how holes or they guess it's enough to copy the drill wholes of good microphones, but it isn't that easy. The power supplies of expensive microphones IMO have an unneeded filter overkill, but it's better to do more than is needed than to use a power supply with bad filtering. Those companies pay engineers for doing the soldering, it isn't done by children and housewives, at least it wasn't done some years ago. You might compare the soldering of instrument cables. Some days ago I got some Thomann cables and some Cordial cables, both are cheap cables, but the soldering for the Thomann is very bad and the soldering for the Cordial is very good. Bad soldering soon or later will cause issues. And last but not least, they pay idiots like me to listen to the microphones before being shipped and the boss will listen to those microphones too. Of cause, a cheap dynamic microphone for the vocalist on stage is better than a expensive large-membrane microphone, so the usage is important too. I heard room sound for orchestras done with large-membrane Neumann that was incredible. You only can do this with Neumann and Brauner large-membrane. Btw. even if it should be possible to improve sound of cheap microphones to get a sound near to an expensive microphone, you need expensive anlog EQs or an expensive converters to use digital EQs, if not the EQs won't improve the sound, but rather add new issues. Note! An analog EQ can cause phase issues, so a tip that might work with top-notch equipment by no means is a good tip when using home recording equipment. I never met a guy* from AES or VDT who wasn't a good engineer. *(I never met any engineering women *lol*, neitehr gifted, nor untalented.) If those folks pay for expensive microphones, they do it for good reasons. If those guys claim that you can do a lot with an EQ, they perhaps aren't talking about cheap EQs. It's possible to do a good mastering without compression, you just need very good EQs to place instruments and vocals within the 'room' of the frequencies. It's hard to this at home or with semiprofessional equipment. Recordings can sound as good as reality ex 48 KHz, when they were done with good = usually very expensive equipment. This get lost for CDs, but even when listening to CDs the responding qualities of different microphones are audible. You can hear Peter Gabriel's breath with transparency for his studio recordings, you can't hear Rory Gallagher's vocals on the Irish Tour album that transparent. And here it is again. A studio recording hasn't the energy of a good live performance, hence it's important to have a better sound quality. Rory Galagher live '74 has so much energy that there isn't the need for a sound quality that is needed for synthetic music like it's done by Peter Gabriel. IMO the needed quality depends to the kind of recording. Recoding a Jazz trio is easier to do than recording 30 synth, just because there's more room to allocate the instruments within the 'frequency room'. So IMO there aren't no universal tips, like use the EQ to do this and that, certainly there are some rules of thumb. Hifi speakers get stressed by some frequencies that can't be played by those speakers, so you might cut them etc.. This and similar rules of thumbs are helpful. Oops a novel, but it's just broached. 2 Cents, Ralf _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
