How do you find the right microphone? If it was a shirt you could keep trying them on until you found one that fit, but with microphones its not that easy. What music retailer is going to let you unbox a bunch of microphones, make recordings of them and compare them on your own monitoring system? Well, not only will we let you do that, we do it for you. Now we aren't going to tell that this alone will tell you everything there is to know, even the best looking shirts don't look good on everybody, but it is an excellent way to compare different microphone and find which sounds "the best" to your ears.

Below you will find links for both High resolution and Low resolution version of files recording using different microphones. All were recording using the same setup, of the same instruments on the same day in the same studio.

For more information on how these files were recorded, click here.

Guitar

Voice

Mic Shootout Methodology:

 Introduction:

These recording were made in our studio here at audioMIDI.com to allow our customers to listen to microphones in a fully objective manner. This is to give the listener the ability to determine which microphone sounds best to them.

The studio here at audioMIDI.com is not completely sound proof, so you might hear a little noise coming from outside sources. This test however, is a good example for anyone who is recording in their home or project studio, as it will give you a real world idea of how these microphones will act in your studio.

The Signal Chain:

A Blue microphone cable was run into an Avalon 737SP. The 737 was set in normal mode (not high-gain) and there was no pad, filter, compression or EQ used during the recording of this process. The signal was then recorded with an Aardvark Q10 into Cubase SX 2.0 at 32 bit / 96kHz. All of the files are within 1dBFS RMS average levels. There is little if any volume differences between all of the files. This is to allow the listener to hear each characteristic of the microphone used. The CD quality files were re-sampled by the re-sampler plug-in Wavelab 5.0. The Dithering was performed by Apogee's UV22, set to 16 bit and “normal”.

  Guitar Recording:

The microphones were placed 10” away from a Taylor NS32 acoustic Nylon. The microphones were pointed exactly in the middle of the sound hole.

Vocal Recording:

The vocalist stood 3” away from each microphone and was not angled in anyway. There was no pop-filter used in front of the mic.

Conculsion:

The task of selecting the correct microphone for your needs is not as straightforward as one might think. Trying to determine the sound characteristics of a particular model at your local music retailer may not be the easiest task. Our goal was to create a series of audio samples recorded in an “all things being equal” scenario. This way, you could listen to the samples and get a pretty good indication regarding the characteristics for each microphone.

As always, your feedback and comments are welcome. Depending on how helpful this project turns out to be, we would like to expand the library of recordings to include a greater selection of microphones as well as pre-amps. If there are any questions on the methodology or you would like to see some other shootouts, please feel free to email me: greg@audiomidi.com