I've been hearing about the Gefell mics for ages, I know rick-slo uses them, anton posted some good sounds with his, and we had a nice demo and discussion from Michael Watts here last week. I finally had a chance to check out a pair of M300s, and spent some time comparing to the Schoeps mics I often use. I added them to a multi-mic setup I had already been messing with, with the Schoeps, Brauner VM1s and AEA NS22 ribbon mics. With the Schoeps and Gefell's I was able to place the mics in as close to the same position as possible (spaced pairs, similar to the setup Michael posted earlier) and use the same preamps (channels of an Apogee Ensemble). Note that the Shoeps are hypercardiod, vs the Gefell cardiod.
The Brauner's and AEA's I recorded just to see how they differed, even tho I'm using different preamps, and didn't even try to get the same mic positions - these are just where these mics have been sounding good to me.
Here's a few bars of some simple chord changes with the Schoeps (first) then the Gefells. No EQ other than a high pass filter at 40Hz and no reverb. I tried to level match all of these as close as I could, tho it's interesting how different notes leap out differently with the different mics.
To be able to hear the differences more easily, I assembled just the first couple of seconds of each mic. Here's Schoeps, Gefell, Brauner, NS22 in sequence with the shorter samples. With the last two, there's a noticeable change in stereo image. I found it pretty interesting to hear both the similarities and the differences between these - haven't done this kind of compare in a while.
Oh, another difference here: the Brauners are thru a Great River preamp, and the NS22s thru an AEA RPQ ribbon preamp. I said "no EQ", and that's true in the DAW, but the RPQ has a treble shelf that was engaged, bringing up the high end of the ribbons a little bit.
Here's what the mic setup looked like:
Attachment 13192
I think the Gefell's sound very nice, tho the difference with the Schoeps is pretty subtle to my ear. Curious what others hear.