quickie M/S mic shootout

Here's a quickie mic shootout I recorded today.

I wanted to test the new ribbon mic in a setting that would naturally compliment it.  That mic likes loud bright things because it has relatively low output and a smooth darkness to it that kind of tames things that can get shrill or scratchy.  It also has low end for days.

As such I figured a good garage door impact slam would do the trick.

I've only got the one mic, so I decided to run it as the figure eight of an MS config with my trusty Line Audio CM3.  That line audio mic has a similar personality to the ribbon (lower output and a darker sound) so I figured the two of them would get along great as an MS pair.  I also had a cloudlifter in line on the ribbon for impedance matching and signal output purposes.  I pretty much don't run that mic without it.

I also wanted to test this rig out against a known quantity, so I put up the workhorse Audio Technica 4050s in an MS pattern right next to them.

The results were pretty interesting.





In many ways the results were as expected.

The 4050s were significantly brighter than the CM3/Ribbon combo, and tracked the transients more closely.  They also sounded cleaner and more clinical, which in some situations is a good thing.  With that said, they still had significant low end punch and didn't sound thin at all. 

The CM3/Ribbon combo was much darker, but the difference really was in how thick this combo made the low mids sound.  There was just tons of punch down there that was very satisfying.  This kind of rig takes EQ very well, but even when I experimented with adding some high end the predominate characteristic was that huge low mid presence.

The difference in the high end was most apparent when I opened the garage door and let the sounds of the birds and traffic from outside through.  The 4050s just opened up and revealed all of the damping that the doors were doing to the outside world.  The CM3/Ribbon combo kind of hung back and let the game come to them.

Given how these two signatures seemed to wrap around one another I figured I'd just add them together.  When overlaid against one another I got this huge thick sound that still had all of its detail and clarity.  Its a lot of mics to put up for one sound, but the end result sure seemed worth it.

Here's a spectrogram of the impacts, with the 20k line marked.

Feel free to download these sounds and use them in whatever context you see fit.  Enjoy!