Hello all, I am Warren Dent, the guy who owns ZenPro Audio as well as the guy who planned out the Clipalator as a means of delivering comparative and repeatable info, rather than relying on marketing and opinion. I found this forum thread by looking at my Google reports of incoming site traffic for my site, and found a lot of people linking to the Clipalator. Upon reading the pages of posts I was a bit taken back by some reactions to what we do so I wanted to inject my own reasoning into your discussion so you at least know a few of the reasons why it is what it is.
I think the intention of the Clipalator can be summed up best by paraphrasing a major industry brand sales rep who visited ZenPro Audio this week. I never quite thought about it in the exact terms that he saw it as. He summed up his thoughts on it by saying “what you're doing is what our industry magazines and other mediums should be doing, but won't do for fear of losing advertisers”. In other words not everything is going to sound great to everybody when hearing the unit side by side with dozens of other competing products, and some companies might take their ball and go home since they can no longer rely on slick ads or paid for “reviews”.
The Clipalator is a system, and we need that system to be repeatable for context. I see people all over the web posting shootouts of three or four microphones, and that is very helpful at that moment in time if you have an interest in exactly those mics. However for anybody wanting to know what they stand up to on a broader scale, and also as new products are released how those stand up, those shootouts cannot bring any further value. You'll notice for as many people trying to help others by doing such things, there are at least as many people posting “I wish you would have tested _____”.
Just speaking to our microphone sessions, they were created by me and planned out to be performed by ONE PERSON. Bands break up, bass players do drugs, drummers don't show up on time...the list goes on. This guy Drew that we use is a reasonably good drummer and guitarist, and while he's not a pro “singer” you have to admit he's about as good as the average modern rocker walking through the door of a pro recording studio. The tracks we are capturing are average, they are not lessons in the ultimate guitar, drum or vocal sounds. It's the kind of stuff that most of us are trying to hammer into a mix to make sound good. However, it would lose sight of the usefulness of the Clipalator to boil it down to “his voice breaks up” or “sometimes he misses a string”, since the value again is context.
That acoustic guitar is mic'd from 14” away, pointed at the 14th fret area. It is a Yamaha acoustic strung up with Elixirs the same way every time, and the same pick is used. He plays an open picked style first, then does heavy strumming. Once we set Drew up in his spot and mic him up, we then use laser pointers mounted on mic stands, to point to the capsule of the mic so that when we swap them out we are lining them up with precision. We test 12 mics at a time, the limit we found to keeping things repeatable with Drew. We use an AKG C414 B-ULS as a “control” mic, it's a familiar sound and helps us to not only dial in as close a sound as we can with each session, but also lets the listener know what differences could have been going on that day. We mark each clip name with a “-5” for example, letting you know that is the session # that mic was recorded in. You can then go and listen to the control mic and help tie the info together in as fair a way as possible.
By the way, the electric guitar tracks are a re-amped DI track and we even use one of the solid state Marshall heads (bought new just for these tests) which is analog but digitally controlled (ie repeatable) fed into the studios 4x12” Marshall cab. We figured out a way to deliver a “clean” style at the beginning, then a heavier “crunch” style during the last half of that track.
Yours is not a forum concerned with drums, but while I'm at it I'll mention that the drums are a maple “Arbiter” kit which uses a single lug tuning system to tune a drum head (as opposed to 8 or 10) so we can use that and a Tama Tension Watch to also be sure those drums deliver as close a tone between sessions as possible.
Human beings are not repeatable. For this very reason we have taken these steps to ensure the most repeatable things can be, from mic placement to the fact that it's one guy playing instruments we own (we don't even rely on him to show up with his own guitars and drums). It is done from the approach of most studios recording pop music, not people only concerned with recording acoustic guitars close mic'd or from a distance. It is a way to fairly compare products, one that we have thousands of hours and dollars invested in, so you can click a mouse to hear the result. There is so much work behind that mouse click it's silly.
There are those that want you to rely on them for their opinion, for them to remain the center of your purchase decisions. Everybody needs a gig I suppose, but as odd as it may seem I am a seller of gear who wants YOU making informed decisions and not falling prey to being pushed into what's in fashion at the moment or makes more money for the sales rep. We value your support, which for us comes in the form of gear purchases that we try to earn in a way nobody else is willing to earn.
Feel free to contact me directly via the site if you ever have questions or concerns.
Wishing you all the best,
Warren Dent
ZenPro Audio
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