Quote:
Originally Posted by Doug Young
Jon, did you use a test tone to at least make sure the mics were all at the same level?
I had a weird case when I first got my Brauners, where I had them side by side with my Schoeps, and level matched, so when I played guitar they had the same basic levels. Then I noticed that if I flipped a light switch across the room, the VU meters on the Brauners jumped dramatically more than the Schoeps. That had me puzzled for a while: how could the mics have the same levels when I played guitar, but pick up a quiet signal differently? Maybe the Brauner's responded "faster"? That didn't seem right, the Schoeps SDs should be faster to respond, if anything. Fran finally came up with a convincing answer - differences in polar patterns or off-axis response. That makes perfect sense. If you read that DPA link someone posted, they also compare how different mics have different patterns at different frequencies. We think of "cardioid" as being a set pattern, but it's not, it varies by mic and my frequency. I'd expect that would have some impact on how each mic picks up Lake Michigan, but might have less impact on how the mics pick up a guitar right in front of it.
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I did use a test tone (first time) based on Fran's advice to me at the time. Also, Doug that is a good point about different "cardioid" mics having different abilities to pick up side and back sounds. Lake Michigan sometimes thinks she is the Pacific Ocean, and it may be that some mics hear that better than others.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fran Guidry
Hopefully you can understand the need to match total system sensitivity between samples if this kind of comparison is to be meaningful. If one mic is 3 dB more sensitive than another it will "pick up more noise" if both mics are used with the same preamp gain.
How many times have we read the suggestion that dynamic mics "pick up less room" than condensers. Intuitively obvious and demonstrably false, but the demonstration takes some effort and very careful level matching.
Fran
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Yes, and again you generously schooled me early on about being attentive to this when comparing mics. One good real life lesson in all this was when I got the Audix SCX-25A, which is about 6db more sensitive than my Shure mics. First few recordings were pretty goofy until I was alerted to the sensitivity of the Audix piano mic.