I sure am glad that Bob, Ty and others spoke-up and said what I wanted to say but, refrained because I lack the hands-on technical credibility.
I was a project engineering manager (working with a company that I cannot legally discuss in public) for about a decade, working in the area of psycho-acoustics. We had a sound lab that cost a little over $1 million and it was dedicated for the development of one single product. I spent a little time in that lab, but not much. We had 4 folks working in the lab on a regular basis. Three were Ph.D's in either math or physics and another guy who didn't have a degree but was a "Golden Ear". -That's right... He had a known, verifiable gift of good hearing. He could hear levels of distortion that the rest of us could see on an oscilloscope but not hear. He could listen blind-folded and tell you exactly when he heard it.
Making a long story short, we had some specialized mics that were unbelievably expensive because they were custom designed and built. In all honesty though, most of our work-horse recordings and daily experiments were done with Audio Technica 2020-21 and 4040-41 mics. Our most often used reference speakers were Yamaha HS7 studio monitors.
Guess what I use at home? An AT 2020 and two, AT 2021's and Yamaha HS7 studio monitors. The mics cost about $150 each.
Ray
__________________
|