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Too Much Fun!
Aloha Friends,
Man, am I having fun with this discussion. Lots of great info & discussions of mic's I never see discussed at AGF. Double Diaphragm Sanken's a first. Kinda like a 1950 Schoeps 221 I once heard & marvelled at. And man did that recording sparkle! Oh, that mythical, epically pure acoustic sound - Siren-like, yet always bekoning, just beyond our fingertips. Yeah, the madness of microphones. I pretend I'm through it, sometimes not buying anything for over a year. But then I hear something. However, my love of mic's providing different colors to pure acoustic sound of the acoustic guitar IS exclusive of my ability & interest to make recordings of that sound. I try, but I'm simply not experienced enough yet with my DAW Logic 9 to pull it off consistently. I have lots of experience with studio & live miking so that really does help. But consistency in my own recordings - USING ANY LEVEL OF MICS - is not quite there. Perhaps my aging ears are where the inconsistencies lie, changing day to day as they do. But better mic's w/ the right pre can shorten the search for the sound I'm after. Love those 641's! Moon, the best part of sites like Zen's is that they expose you to different mic types & brands than you may be familiar with. Their sound samples have always been mickey mouse to my ears. But what they are trying to do is not. The Listening Sessions is another comparison site at about the same level. And Soundpure's samples on pro level gear & instruments are excellent. Another great site is gearslutz. Lots of gear shoot-outs & a more pro engineer perspective, especially the "High End" thread. And that is a great place to find gear at their "Classifieds" section. I've worked that one heavily with no problems & gear in great shape. Check it out. Still, I believe that the best way to audition mic's is with your ears, on your instruments & rig & NOT through online samples. Most are not very good. But I really appreciate Fran & Doug's comparisons - they take the time to do it right, so that it is a truly honest & useful resource. They do it with wit, & with an acoustic ear & sensibility, both being such good players too. They should actually be great pro engineers really & indeed both ARE at times while sharing that love of pure acoustic tone in all its many manifestations. We are lucky they are so generous & professional. Mahalo boys! Old pro's Ty & Bob are right on the money too. I determined that since I lived in Hawaii (no serious pro audio stores), & mp3. computer samples don't sound that great (we're going backwards!), the only way I could really check out mic's throroughly is to rent 'em from far away & do my own shoot-outs on my rig at home for a day or two. Occasionally, I do go to LA & go on mic & pre binges at studio's & great pro stores. Fun but expensive & I don't like to leave the Islands much these days. Used is definitely a great way to go. But you really do need to check your sources first & to be ready to return anything you don't like. Because mic's are often abused or stored in less than ideal environments or have changed hands several times. My success rate on used mic's is about 75%. But it can really save you money & get you into tools you wouldn't necessarily be able to afford. And do not overlook mods. I have had lots of luck with Jim Williams & Michaels Joly & Dorsey, & the venerable John Carruthers among others upgrading some mic's I've owned. All my current S/D pairs I bought new. Many pairs came & went - hundreds. As Scott said, let something go when you're on to something new. For example, this past year, I've let go about six pairs of mic's & a pre - all in great shape & pro level - to put the money into something else - more room treatment. Ha! I'm becoming an O.C. 703 FRK freak, boys! ("I used to be a heroin addict, now I'm a methadone addict" - that little kid from the old movie, Annie Hall). But the S/D's I kept were all new, accumulated over about 10 years. My L/D's & the R84 were all bought used as were all my preamps (who has $2.9K for a new MDP-1a?) got mine in great condition for $1300 - two years old. I had the vintage '72 U-87's reconditioned by Neumann (took half a year but worth it). RE: Preamp gain requirements for ribbons? The mic pre's on that little Apogee Duet interface & its big brother Ensemble provide up to 75 dB of gain & sounds great with the R84. In fact, all my pre's could provide plenty of gain for that mic & the MK8 ribbon capsule on one CMC641 I sometimes use for M-S. No need for special ribbon pre's. As Doug has said & Scotty too, over time, in collecting & trying out mic's & gear, once you get to a pro level, you get much more in return for the more sought after brands/models & can quickly move that into other colors of mic's at the same level without going broke upgrading. Unless we're wealthy, we're all at different levels in that game. Sure I'd love the Brauner VM-1 that Doug currently fancies for recording, but I'm not at that level yet. & he got a great deal on those two, way below market, right Doug? Here's a little clip Moon that Doug provided a few years back comparing the VM-1 (first sample) & the 641 (second) - As Sdelsolray has often said, "Different Flavors of Nice!": http://www.dougyoungguitar.com/mp3/m...er_Schoeps.wav But I'll stick with the CMC641's for now. Hey, a pair of those close-miked in X-Y at around 12-16" combined with that pair of U-87's in a spaced pair just a tad farther out for some room is an acoustic sound that has grown on me. If only I could get it right everytime. Dam Ears! Again, to all of you, Mahalo a nui for this discussion & to the love or curse of mic acquisition. Not ear candy or mere tools to me. I love mic's! A Hui Hou! alohachris Last edited by alohachris; 09-15-2011 at 12:23 AM. |
#32
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Sadly I think they have gone away. I've not seen anything at http://thelisteningsessions.com for ages now. |
#33
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Like you (even though I live stateside) my former location in the wilderness fringe of Wyoming made live audition fairly difficult. So I to would spend hours lurking at Gearsluts trying to glean info. What It did for me, like you mentioned about sights like Zen, was introduce me the names of gear that was being used. Then I would attempt to distill down the vast array of info to those items that seemed to get the most repeated mention, based in my area of interest, i.e. vocal and acoustic guitar. So the value to people getting into recording of sites like GS and AGF and another Tape OP is a possible narrowing of the field so that when you do get a chance to live audition you can try 2 or 4 or 6 items instead of 20. Hey a couple of things about "If only I could get it right everytime. Dam Ears!" Have you had a hearing test (usually free at audiology houses) ? I suspected I had some damage after 35 years of carpentry and sure enough I have prototypical noise induced hearing loss in the freq's of 3k to 4k. The good news for me in this situation is the new digital hearing aids ( last 4 years or so ) are actually fairly good at replicating freq. specific sound, in the typical ranges of human voice. Still not that good on bass or anything above about 8k but if your problem is in the 200 hz to 7khz range you might want to check them out. about the price of a Schoeps Hey another thought and perhaps this is old news but as to "If only I could get it right everytime" You are using a session template with all parameters pre set and positioning tape on the floor Yes?
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Enjoy the Journey.... Kev... KevWind at Soundcloud KevWind at YouYube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...EZxkPKyieOTgRD System : Studio system Avid Carbon interface , PT Ultimate 2023.12 -Mid 2020 iMac 27" 3.8GHz 8-core i7 10th Gen ,, Ventura 13.2.1 Mobile MBP M1 Pro , PT Ultimate 2023.12 Sonoma 14.4 |
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Derek Coombs Youtube -> Website -> Music -> Tabs Guitars by Mark Blanchard, Albert&Mueller, Paul Woolson, Collings, Composite Acoustics, and Derek Coombs "Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Woods hands pick by eye and ear
Made to one with pride and love To be that we hold so dear A voice from heavens above |
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[QUOTE
Great post, Chris! I'd say something clever here in Hawaiian but... oops, I don't know Hawaiian (or is it Hawaii'an?)! [/QUOTE] Reading this, the song "Lets talk dirty in Hawaiian" by John Prine just poped into my head
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Enjoy the Journey.... Kev... KevWind at Soundcloud KevWind at YouYube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...EZxkPKyieOTgRD System : Studio system Avid Carbon interface , PT Ultimate 2023.12 -Mid 2020 iMac 27" 3.8GHz 8-core i7 10th Gen ,, Ventura 13.2.1 Mobile MBP M1 Pro , PT Ultimate 2023.12 Sonoma 14.4 |
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yes, tho that still doesn't guarantee the same sound every time :-)
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Music: Spotify, Bandcamp Videos: You Tube Channel Books: Hymns for Fingerstyle Guitar (std tuning), Christmas Carols for Fingerstyle Guitar (std tuning), A DADGAD Christmas, Alternate Tunings book Online Course: Alternate Tunings for Fingerstyle Guitar |
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I think those were pretty well done, showing that the differences between gear is more subtle than most people think. As as already been discussed, a lot of differences in some shootouts is due to differences in levels or other aspects of the recording.
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Music: Spotify, Bandcamp Videos: You Tube Channel Books: Hymns for Fingerstyle Guitar (std tuning), Christmas Carols for Fingerstyle Guitar (std tuning), A DADGAD Christmas, Alternate Tunings book Online Course: Alternate Tunings for Fingerstyle Guitar |
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Not sure that is what they wanted to show but it about ended up that way.
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Derek Coombs Youtube -> Website -> Music -> Tabs Guitars by Mark Blanchard, Albert&Mueller, Paul Woolson, Collings, Composite Acoustics, and Derek Coombs "Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Woods hands pick by eye and ear
Made to one with pride and love To be that we hold so dear A voice from heavens above |
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The comments about all the samples sounding similar is just hilarious to me.
I keep waiting for one of the folks who has heard improvements from switching preamps or a/d to provide level matched same source clips that let the rest of us hear the difference. Please!! It's not _that_ hard and you might learn something as well as instruct the rest of us. In the meantime I'll stay with the opinion I've developed over ten years or so of fooling with this stuff. Electronics are a lot more consistent than human perception. Audible transparency is relative cheap and easy to achieve in the 21st century and measurements bear this out. There is a threshold of audibility for noise, distortion, and frequency response variation. If two devices keeps those issues below the threshold of audibility humans can't hear any difference between them. This certainly doesn't prevent the marketing department from demanding that the engineering department improve the numbers so the sales brochure has something to talk about, but it does prevent any audible difference from appearing in the final result. So, please, could we have some clips demonstrating the difference between a Mackie and a Great River? Between a Great River and a GML? Between a Fireface 400 and Mytek? One last thought ... if you were a manufacturer of a/d converters and your converter _sounded_ better than others, wouldn't you provide clips that could demonstrate this improvement in double-blind comparisons? I know I would. Can someone point me to a manufacturer who does this? Fran
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E ho`okani pila kakou ma Kaleponi Slack Key in California - www.kaleponi.com My YouTube clips The Homebrewed Music Blog |
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http://www.vintageking.com/Wunder-Au...er-Microphones Save $700 on a Wunder CM12H, discounted from $8,995 down to $8,295. The _really_ pricey stuff is the vintage tube mics. They don't list prices for those but be prepared to shell out 5 figures. Fran
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E ho`okani pila kakou ma Kaleponi Slack Key in California - www.kaleponi.com My YouTube clips The Homebrewed Music Blog |
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When you are talking about one very good piece of equipment and another very good piece of equipment (especially mike preamps) the differences in results can be small. Thus some of the results on The Listening Sessions are quite close. Regarding AD converters, as I said the Mytek converter I bought made quite a difference - I really noticed its effect on reverb sound compared to RME's AD. Mytek did a comparison of different units here: http://www.mytekdigital.com/compare/index.htm
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Derek Coombs Youtube -> Website -> Music -> Tabs Guitars by Mark Blanchard, Albert&Mueller, Paul Woolson, Collings, Composite Acoustics, and Derek Coombs "Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." Woods hands pick by eye and ear
Made to one with pride and love To be that we hold so dear A voice from heavens above |
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You made me laugh a bit when you suggested that guys like Geoff Tanner, Dan Lavry, or Fred Forssell (to name three high end builders) have "marketing departments" . These guys are writing most of their own material and *maybe* (if we're lucky) passing it off to someone else to code the HTML. Are you suggesting guys like that are just making up numbers so that they can convince us that theirs is somehow different than others or better than something else (often indicated by the price!)? As for why converter companies, preamp companies, amp companies, etc don't do A/B tests with other manufacturers' gear and then host those tests on their websites, I'll take a stab at two reasons: 1) Because taste is subjective - the user may have come to your site to buy your converter but liked the other better. That would make no sense if your "they're all the same" idea is true but I don't agree with you and maybe they don't either. 2) To avoid lawsuits from the manufacturers of the other gear who can say you were disparaging them by intentionally making theirs look bad. Even if you weren't doing that, all that they have to do is threaten you with a lawsuit and poof! You'll take the files down stat! I'm not a gear manufacturer so this is just speculation. |
#43
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No, No guaranties but they are good work flow things to help with consistency .
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Enjoy the Journey.... Kev... KevWind at Soundcloud KevWind at YouYube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...EZxkPKyieOTgRD System : Studio system Avid Carbon interface , PT Ultimate 2023.12 -Mid 2020 iMac 27" 3.8GHz 8-core i7 10th Gen ,, Ventura 13.2.1 Mobile MBP M1 Pro , PT Ultimate 2023.12 Sonoma 14.4 Last edited by KevWind; 09-15-2011 at 04:55 PM. |
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I know for certain that there are people who hear stuff I don't. I'm a fogey who stood too close to loud amps too often. But I don't hear _any_ difference at all in the comparisons I downloaded. Please, someone, anyone, pull some of those clips into a double-blind ABX tool and select one from the other 10 times out of 10. I tried until my brain hurt and came up with a coin flip. The comparison at the top of the page is sheer genius, in my opinion, because Mytek set up three competitor products that cost substantially more than the equivalent Mytek. And they sound the same. So the Myteks must be a terrific bargain. Of course, they're only a bargain if they're better than their lower cost alternatives. I didn't see any Echo Audio or Presonus or M-Audio or Lynx or RME in the list, but when I pulled up the Apogee and Protools HD192 clips they also sounded the same as the Myteks to me. So, thanks so much for pointing out these comparison clips. I'm still hoping to hear some that demonstrate an audible difference. Fran
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E ho`okani pila kakou ma Kaleponi Slack Key in California - www.kaleponi.com My YouTube clips The Homebrewed Music Blog |
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Your speculations about comparison clips can end, since Rick pointed out the Mytek comparison clips. Did you download those samples and find a pair that you could differentiate in a double-blind ABX 10 times out of 10? Scott, I'm thinking you have lots of nifty gear. I would think you would be the ideal guy to whip up a couple of clips of the same performance matched in level within 1 dB or less and run through two different transparent preamps or converters operating in their linear range. Then we could hear what you hear. Fran
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E ho`okani pila kakou ma Kaleponi Slack Key in California - www.kaleponi.com My YouTube clips The Homebrewed Music Blog |