Mics – updated August 2010.

Mic technology hasn’t changed too much in the past 20 years outside the precision available in computer controlled manufacturing and computer assisted analog engineering. Designing them is still an art. The highest price Mics are 40 year old + German Tube mics or copies thereof. .. and the people paying this money have good ears.

Its certainly true that mic selection contributes a lot to the recording process. However, getting the sound you want does not always require an expensive mic – but beware, lots of cheap mics sound cheap. Of the problems to look out for, the first is noise, second is ability to take spl, third, strange coloration, fourth, brashness – and somewhere in the list, off axis coloration. Just plain funny-sounding is a risk too.

Tube mics are the new retro panacea. They can warm up sounds – but they can have coloration that really can hurt. Also, they are fussy, and variable in their tone. High maintenance, you might say. I used a AKG c12 reissue on a track recently and regretted it because the tube has this lump that seemed ugly once we got to the mix. So I eq’d it out. So why did I use that mic? I guess I was hypnotized by the idea of a $4000 tube mic. Tube mics, when driven hard, accentuate second harmonic. Tubes are noisy. Tubes are more gain linear than transistors in theory. I don’t know if this difference is audible. Some tube mics have cool features that are implemented because of the power supply that usually comes with a tube mic. The Lawson tube mics allow infinite gradations of the pattern, for example. (The Lawson 47 MP mic is a legend, and maybe the best deal going in a German Clone. ). The soft clipping of a tube can be useful. You can risk driving a tube mic harder all else being equal, and if you clip, its not quite as ugly as clipping a transistor circuit. My new Soundelux e49 is interesting on drums – it compresses when there’s too much spl rather than making bad distortion.

Transformers vs Transformerless microphones. Transformers are used for impedance matching in mics as they are in preamps. The alternative is a series of transistors and a bit less flexibility as far as the matching. On the other hand, the best mic designers and best mics (historically) have transformers. Its very difficult to find a small (tiny) transformer that will handle big bass transients – and they are expensive if they are good enough. Thus high quality mics with transformers are more expensive. Transformers have a “sound” – often a desirable “focused” sound – but they are not colorless. High quality transformerless mics sound smooth. If you want a cost effective neutral sound the transformerless mics can be great. This is basically a debate among designers – but analog circuit design still has a few surprises for us I suspect so transformerless does not mean worse or better its just choice the designer made. I see flaming opinions all over the web on this topic. I advise you to make up you own mind – but I won’t get further into it.

Most mics seem high endy to me. Its fools gold. Transient accurate and flat mids are more important than sparkle. The thing real life has that studio equipment doesn’t is extreme dynamic range – and perfect transient response and smooth frequency response through the mids. . J.

Overall strategy is important when building a studio. There are lots of tradeoffs – but mostly the tradeoff is flattering vs accurate. Since accurate is always subjective, and mics can never do anything but approximate a sound anyway, I go for flattering. The best solution in most recording is to get what you want onto tape with no processing. Read any book on analog circuit design and it becomes obvious that eq creates phase problems all over the spectrum – not only in the area of the spectrum being eq’d. Thus – eq is scary. It does a lot bad stuff your ear will not anticipate. Maybe until its too late. Dream all you want about great eq: it’s all a compromise compared to not needing any. Thus – mic selection is important. With highly linear digital eq’s now available its less of an issue – however, there’s more to the sound than just eq – it’s the way the mic might respond in terms of dynamic range in a frequency band. The mic emulation software you can get now follows the eq of the mics its trying to emulate – but you are superimposing the eq (and smear etc) of the mic you are using in the first place.

Did those “modeling guitar amps” sound good?

Mics have eq in them of course – that’s what a rolloff is. These rolloffs are high quality eq generally because they are simple, usually just a cap and a resistor or 2, like a first or second order crossover network. Still, they create distortion. The most beautiful sounding mics are simple omni with no rolloff. Cardioid mics use an acoustic process to phase cancel stuff coming from the rear of the capsule – but its impossible to make those phase cancellations perfect. Its much easier to get phase cancellation perfect where there is perfect symmetry – which accounts, in part, for the lovely sound of ribbon mics, which have almost perfect cancellation in the null plane.

You can use a mic to either accentuate the positive or eliminate the negative. Most engineers go the later route – because they are conservative. But I think if people appreciate the positive they will forgive a little negative. If a guitar player has cool growl give ‘em a mic that is a bit growly (700 hz). Everything has a sweet spot and the goal of the mix is to make main thing stand out while making the most of each sound you are working with. Things should find their right place in the mix without too much trouble if you anticipated everything right with mics and mic placement.

I recently read a statement by an accomplished engineer that there are only two good things a mic can do: 1) Perfectly represent what’s in front of it, and 2) Flatter the thing that’s in front of it. This is about right. Don’t be fooled by false flattery, however. The high end bump in so many condensers (often this is a result of the native resonance, or “Fs” of the diaphragm in a condenser), is not as essential as many people think when it comes time to sit a voice in the mix. I’m kinda over that sizzle – but I still end up putting some air in a lot of vocal tracks.

Micing voice is the hardest thing to do. Humans are organic. They vibrate in all sorts of cool ways – and some Darwin-wired thing in our brain makes us very sensitive to differences. If you have a room that sounds good and is very quiet, you can put a mic way out front and let the mic hear the whole body. This is a good strategy if the mic can get the right low end. I had a singer in here this week who had a 4 octave range, and for each part of her range, a different mic was optimal. This is not my-ears-are-better-than-yours stuff – she heard it too. In the end we settled on a combination of mics – but man what a pain. She had a harshness when she started to strain than wanted a warm mic, but the ribbon just would not get her natural air so we added another mic for that, and then blended them depending on the song. It worked well.

Types of Mics

Condenser mics generally hear everything in a pretty big zone – cardiod or not. They tend to be noisy not only because they have active electronics, but because they pick up room noise so relentlessly. For low end you don’t need high speed but it doesn’t hurt. They are delicate, easy to ruin with smoke or humidity, and generally sensitive. They need phantom power. They can be big or small (tiny). There are some great sounding very small condenser mics – size isn’t everything. The Fullcompass catalog has a nice primer on mics if you want to overall picture.

Dynamic mics generate the power needed to send a balanced signal to a preamp without using any outside power – just like a passive guitar pickup. They tend to be sturdy, quiet, take big spl, and can sound great. Generally undervalued, I think. They are also simpler to manufacture than condenser mics, so cost less.

Ribbon Mics are strange. They have almost no self noise – but need a preamp with high gain. So the noise floor is defined by the preamp. They are delicate and easy to break. They are expensive. So why use ‘em? The answer is they are very quick, like a condenser, but quiet like a dynamic. They sound smooth, not glassy. There is nothing as nice for micing a guitar amp as a ribbon mic, and they are superb for horns. Very smooth midrange and they take spl for days. If you send phantom power to them (through the wrong wire) they die immediately. Fortunately I’ve never had that experience. Some journeyman producers put their ribbon in the “don’t leave home without it” category. I have an AEA R84 and it’s without a doubt my favorite mic for a range of instruments – and a “must” for Mandolin, violin, electric guitar, horns, resonator guitars, and anything with brashness. These mics are very sensitive to emi in the air (hum) – you need great cables and an electronically quiet environment. Like a single coil pickup, you can turn them and the hum goes away. The royer 122 is an active ribbon – with an active preamp inside it which makes it look like a condenser to a preamp. I love mine.

Piezo Mics can be handy. As boundary mics they can sound stellar for picking up ambience, they will make for a crisp overhead. They can’t overload, they are physically flat, and very “fast”. .. and cheap. They won’t give you much low end or low end coloration.

Special purpose mics. Shotgun mics are used for film/video because they have a hyper-directionality. They are condensers and often sound quite good on axis. Headworn, lapel, and instrument mics are teeny mics used in theatre or performance – not studio. Theatre micing is its own art form. Getting sweaty actors to keep teeny mics in the right place is tough. Some Theatre sound people put their mics inside condoms to keep them from being killed by sweat. Some shows lose a mic per night. Many are wireless – which is a whole book by itself. One show I was involved with used 65 wireless mics. Movie sound is a deep subject I don’t know much about – just enough to be amazed.

Measurement mics are common, omni, always condenser (or electet), and vary in price from 49 dollars to 5000. B&K has dozens of measurement mics for special applications in vibration control. Often they are piezo. Their website is great. Earthworks makes great measurement mics too. (Actually, Earthworks makes great mics period.)

Binaural Mics are supposed to be like your ears. Stereo, and sometimes mounted on a fake head. Great for stereo micing events (bootlegs). Uncanny placement in the stereo field – or 5.1.

Some comments on a few of the mics that I’ve used.

In no particular order….

Radio Shack Piezo – I had a drummer who glued this 30 dollar mic to a flat bit of plastic and mounted it to a stand as a drum overhead. It sounded great and it was unbreakable. Perfect for a small club, and it didn’t want to feedback, and it didn’t bleed much considering it was an overhead - just enough to get the sizzle of the symbols into the pa.

Sure sm-57. It’s a desert island mic. Mic instruments, toms, amps, vocals. They are low noise, cheap, industry standard, and easy to fix. They sound good for vocal but need a windscreen. They only suck for micing things at a distance.

AKG c12 – smooth as butter – certainly a world class Vocal mic, but there can be problems.

Studio Projects C1 – Great Deal and a revolution when they came out – but a little harsh for me.

Unnamed 49 dollar vocal mic from Guitar center. Sounded like absolute crap – no definition or low end.

Beyer MG201- This is a beautiful sounding dynamic mic. Silky. It’s a common standard on snare but it will do a lot of other things with real class. Highly recommended.

AEA R84 – I can’t say enough about this mic. Things sound like they sound in the room. I keep a recording of all my mics side by side with me saying stuff into them, and a few drum hits. There’s like 20 tracks so far. The R84 is the only one where I sound like myself to me. Its remarkable. No doubt it’s the most elegant, useful, and downright interesting mic in my collection. Get two. Beware of hum. Best mando mic ever. Great on harmonica (no bad reed noises – fat, fat, fat). I can’t wait until someone comes in with a screechy violin. As one reviewer put it “Butter for a margarine world”. No doubt.

Note: Someone finally came in with a screechy violin, and it turned the screech to butter.

Sure KSM32 – Wow… but a little too nasal for a lot of applications, I think. Very clean transients – good for acoustic guitars. It’s amazing with brushes on a snare. I think they sound nasal next to a lot of mics, however. Its that Sure 1000hz thing…. Like a trademark impairment. Yeah, that thang makes it stand out in a mix, but everything can’t stand out. Also, on brash sounding things like a screechy violin, it sounds like hell. A solid mic for the collection, however.

AKG c3000 – A lot of variation between years, but nice for overheads, or even vocals.

Seems to overload easily. Warmer than some other cheap condensers. Its worked on a violin where the ksm32 sounded harsh. A little grainy and harsh. It’s never my first choice for anything, to tell the truth.

Octava MC12 – With the full kit (all the capsules) a swiss arm knife for cheap. Very flat in omni. A little midrangy and harsh on a high hat but a steal for the price. Very usable – but still a cheap mic, and not in the class of the more expensive small condensers.

Neumann U87 – An industry standard for a reason. Don’t be fooled by look alikes. It’ll do anything with class.

Sennheiser MD-421 – Another standard. Great mids. Try it on a high hat. Some variation mic to mic. Good for toms. Even male Vocal. Don’t drop it. A little mid-rangy for a lot of applications, however. They have a cool 5 step rolloff.

CAD drum mics. I heard a live gig done with them and the drums sounded great. Cheap too.

Audix d2 – To make it sound right its gotta be right on a loud source. (like a tom) Then, quite good for a live mic. I used it the other day in the studio for the bottom of a tom and it sounded like crap. Might have been the tom.

Audix OM5. Smooth vocal mic. It has amazing off axis rejection. Rolls off too soon so it’s bad for anything with material below 150 hz – which is almost anything. It might be my 1^st choice for live female vocals.

EV ND-757 – a workhorse, great rejection, great tone, bass rolloff switch, my favorite everyday live mic for male vocals. They now have a reissue (made in china I think).

Cascade VX20. Great mic for the money. Huge sounding with a tube pre. Among the best “cheap condensers” I’ve heard. Its not overly hyped in the highs, and decent mids. Not as detailed or as good off axis as more expensice condensers.

Cascade M20 (discontinued) – Not so great – like a lot of other cheap large diaphragm condensers. However, one time I did a kick drum a 20 feet to get the low low end and it worked pretty well for that.

Sure SM-58 – Another workhorse, of course. You can wear them out by screaming into them for 3 years of weekends. You’ll wear yourself out at about the same rate. The Beta 58 is the neodymium version and I don’t like it particularly well – it sounds a bit brittle. I had a Beta Green 58 one time and I loved it – the switch came in handy.

Blue Baby Bottle - A rather enigmatic mic. For some female vocals its about the sweetest thing I ever heard. For others, ouch. It captures everything. Its off axis rejection is ok as far as coloration, not great, and it does not reject much. On drums, can be amazing. On female vocals, it’s mostly good, but on some male vocals, terrible (nasal). This is a persnickety little mic. I haven’t quite figured it out yet – but when it’s on, its on. I’m pretty convinced that on the right source, you can’t buy a better mic for any price period. I just haven’t been able to predict what the right souce is – but again, on a lot of Female vocals its up there with the big boys - like u47 fet. It actually seems quite flat – maybe a bit of a mid boost around 900-2000. A bit mouthy too. If you get a mouth noise person, it’s a little too intimate.

Neumann km84. A studio standard small condenser. Guitars, overheads, choir, - almost anything. Big proximity effect – to a fault perhaps, because you will find yourself using a high pass filter (low cut) more than you need to. Clean off axis. Beautiful on wood instruments. A coincident pair on a violin rocks. Its newer cousin the KM184 sounds different – not as neutral. The KM184 has a presence bump and an “air” bump at about 8k. They don’t make KM84’s any more, just 184’s.

Sure Beta 52 – Good kick mic for that big rock sound.

AKG D112 – Another great kick mic – but most people I know like the Sure better. I think I saw someone micing a guitar amp with one once – and it was perfect. This actually makes sense because it would control the fizz of a distorted guitar amp.

Studio Projects c4. Workhorse. An engineer friend of mine with golden ears and years of studio ownership calls them km84-killers. Extra nice in Omni. I thought they were less boxy than the km84 in some tests. Less boom too. Not exciting, but workmanlike. I think they are not as detailed as the km84.

Blue Dragonfly. In your face, and lush sounding. A winner – every studio should have one for its unique brand of forwardness. Sounds a lot like the Mouse and Kiwi.

Rode NT2 – Brash. Nasty. Why does anyone like them? I don’t know.

THE Audio KR-25A. and KR33A. Smooth but very high-endy. Amazingly clean off axis and great rejection at the same time.. This mic nails acoustic guitar. I also have the KR-33 capsule. This is a fine capsule. It has the low noise character of the 25A, and good rejection. For Female vocals the Baby Bottle blows it away for that lush sound women like these days. For Male vocals the 33 is pretty good. Seems a tad harsh on a female singer last week – but it might have been her. I used it on a snare the other day for grins and it was amazing. Not very sensitive, and not very reliable, and impossible to service. I would not buy THE again.

Gefell UMT70s. This is a great mic period. It can be a little bit high endy – but the high end is beautiful. It has that golden thing on brass that I only hear on Neumann Mics. I have used it as a mono overhead in Live Jazz recording, and it was stunning (fig 8), and I have used it to mic a piano live, and also very good. This is a mic for all seasons, and I think every locker should have two. I only have one, but I’m gonna fix that soon.

Earthworks Z30x matched pair. Quite remarkable mics. The word on these is they sound good on things that sound good. Any warts in the source will be revealed. They flatter nothing, they leave out nothing. Broad but tight cardioid pattern is almost clinical in its perfection. The off axis area is flat, and down considerably. It’s the perfect mic for spot micing in a bad room. It takes DB for days (like, 145 or something). They have a pronounced proximity effect. They are flat at 6 inches. 2 db 8 hz to 40k. Amazing. Pull them 3 feet away and you lose a lot of low end. Too much to be useful except where you want a rolloff. They are very pop-prone. I had a guitar player make vocal pops with it and ruin a recording – 18 inches from his mouth – I was micing his guitar!# and his p’s somehow found their way into the guitar mic. Live and learn. For drum overheads they will not pick up tom rumble at all – so they are fine if you also have close mics, but no good if you are counting on them to get all the lows from the kit from 4 feet away. I did a flute the other day with a Z30 and the player stayed around 6 inches away. It was amazing. I am sure I have never heard such clean detail. Its directional quality allowed us to get rid of much of the valve opening/closing sound – and that part which remained in the off axis was so perfect that I could hear which valves needed cleaning. Some people think these mics are great for bootlegs – but I can’t imagine how they would get enough low end. I’d pick a km184 or something like it.

AT4047SV – I can’t say anything bad about it. Is smooth , fine off axis, great detail, heavy duty build quality, good “reach”, and no sonic warts. No compromise here. It’s a good mic. A bit brash in some applications despite its rep for being not brash. It’s the mic I keep out all the time for general purpose use.

Soundeluxe e49. Warm and fuzzy. Lush. Great on almost anything. Best for Female vocals and drums imo.

Mic Placement.

This is a big topic. There is much written about it. Here’s the tip. Use your ears. Put your ear where the mic will be and ask the musician to play. Then try this: Put on headphones, with the Q mix running if possible, and move the mic around with the musician playing their part until the new sound fits in. Often 1/4 inch will make a big difference. Tilt it different ways to get different phase. Experiment with off axis. Then you know it will fit into the mix without much eq – and you’ve done the best you can..

In general, proximity to the source is the first question in Mic placement. Note the source may be a human playing an instrument and they move when they play. (darn!). This means all your mic placement efforts may have been for nothing. This problem is reduced with distance from the source. Note also acoustic instruments sound different everywhere around the instrument. What part are you going to mic? For these reasons, acoustic instruments including voice (the body has different sounds coming from the mouth, chest, neck) are often miced from a distance so that all the parts making a sound are in the pattern. The trade off here is bleed or noise from the room. Of course, this is an “objectivist” point of view. It assumes your goal is to capture what a person standing nearby would hear. But …You can have any goal you want. Maybe you want the nasal effect of a singer, or (more typical) to hear the high end of an acoustic guitar but get rid of the boomy bass. So there’s no rule except that you should know what you want on the recording, anticipate the mix issues, and mic the source accordingly. For “live” mixing, there are fewer choices. Bleed and noise on stage make close micing a requirement in most cases. When distance micing in an acoustically compromised environment, keep in mind that our ears/brains compensate psychoacoustically for ambience. The mic hears more than you do. Once you have coloration on the track, all the choices are ugly. Also, the use of compressors badly accentuates whatever room coloration might be in the track – so basically, bad room noise is extra bad because every trick to compensate has its own associated problems. I have not tried using an expander – but that might help move the big signal up from a bad noise floor.

You can take out bad coloration with eq if you are careful. Unfortunately the nasty stuff usually falls between 60 and 1000 hz – right where the fundamentals of instruments are – so you will throw some “baby” out with the “bathwater” if you are not careful. In Rx EQ – the baby/bathwater problem is a place where experience helps a lot. I used to go track by track pulling out bad resonance – but found out that this ends up using a lot of eq, contributing to an overall thin sound. When endeavoring to reduce resonance in a live situation, start with loud things that may excite room resonances and fix the source. In live mixes these room resonances can dominate – and require dumping massive amounts of some frequency band with your house eq. Often these resonances are like 40 db in a narrow (10 hz) range – which no eq can really take out and still sound good. These resonances pick up in all the mics and now ugly bleed is in everything. Mics with good off axis rejection help a lot with this problem. I recently auditioned an Audix OM5 that had great off axis rejection. The EV ND series also has great rejection. The Earthworks cardoids (sr77 etc) not only have good rejection but lack coloration in the off axis area. This is a very important attribute for nice sounding recordings – and one reason the Earthworks mics cost more than the others mentioned. An sr77 might be my next purchase.

Many studios have a “dead” sound, some are too “live”. Sometimes the ambience sounds great – uncolored – and you can pull your mics back a bit just to let it in. Either way, your mic will hear that sound. In “dead” rooms, you often have to add some high end to make a sound natural. So, “neutral” rooms with some ambience are my preference. Dead rooms sound intimate and accurate – something I like – so everything is a choice. Again: in the end the listener (audience, remember them?) IS in a room. That room has some ambience. We get so hung up on making things sound good in a control room that we forget that the reproduction environment will have “reverb” – so most tracks or mixes need less than we tend to think.

If the room sounds good, let it in and that’s one more effect, one more channel, one more circuit, one more digital process, and one more noise floor absent from your mix. Let the mics put the sound you want on tape and life will be simpler and your recording will be better.

Mics and Preamps. I would rather have a serviceable mic and a great pre than a great mic and a serviceable pre. Why? Because a great pre can make an average mic sound great, while a bad pre can do nothing but ruin a very expensive mic. The best preamps adapt to the impedance needs of the mic, and its headroom, and are as fast as the diaphragm. Even better, great channel strips (Pendulum, manly, etc) can compensate so well for a mic issue that it sounds like a better mic than it is.