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!

building a ribbon mic: part 1 - construction

Way back in July 2011 recordinghacks.com did a $60k ribbon mic shootout, and I had the opportunity to listen to a wide variety of ribbons on different sources due to the hard work of those dedicated pros. 

Around the same time, I was making a big personal aesthetic shift away from bright and quiet mics and towards warmer mics with more character - especially for recording bright and transient sources.  I knew then that I had to have at least one ribbon in my collection.  The problem of course, is that ribbon mics are expensive and I only spend so much money on gear any given year.

The solution to my problem ended up being the DIY Austin ribbon mic.  I don't have a ton of DIY experience, but I can work a soldering iron competently, so I felt like I'd have a shot at building the mic successfully.  I googled around a bit and found a few people that had built the mic with relatively little experience. 

In the end, the audio samples and the $200 price tag had me sold, so I took the leap.

Initially I didn't know exactly how much pride of ownership I'd feel or deserve after assembling the mic.  I certainly wasn't the one who designed it or even who sourced the materials.  In my mind, I was just going to essentially step into the shoes of a mic plant assembly line worker, so how would I feel when the mic that I built with my hands was complete?

Within a short time of the online purchase I had full detailed instructions in my inbox and a link to a series of videos detailing the construction.  It was great to get this in my hands early, as I was able to review the videos and instructions a few times before the mic even arrived at my door. 

The instructions and videos are not high on production value, but they are entirely informative and thorough.  I never felt wanting for instructions or reasoning in assembling the mic.

Once I had cleared out my workspace I set about building the ribbon motor, which meant gluing the two powerful rare-earth magnets onto the brace with a plastic spacer holding them against the walls. Next was to glue the conductive sheet to the edges of the brace and solder the lead wires to it.

All of that was the easy part.

The trickiest part was cutting and mounting the ribbon.  The ribbon in these mics is made from aluminum leaf whose thickness is measured in millionths of an inch.  It is incredibly fragile, and the process requires cutting a 1/4" ribbon with an exacto knife and then corrugating it with a wooden dowel inside of a sheet of paper to make it springy.

I shot a little timelapse of my building the first part of the mic, but the camera ran out of space as I tried again and again to cut and mount a proper ribbon into the ribbon motor.


first part of assembly-austin ribbon mic from rene coronado on Vimeo.


The kit only comes with one sheet of aluminum leaf, and by the end of the evening (and the timelapse) I had ruined all of it.

Undeterred, I went to hobby lobby the next day and bought more.  I spend the next evening ruining even more, but with every attempt I got further and further into the process before making some fatal error.  At one point I had cut and corrugated 3 consecutive ribbons with my exacto knife in a row, and was only breaking them in the mounting process, so I knew I was getting close.

Finally somewhere in the middle of my third sheet of leaf I managed to get a proper cut, mount and tension and I was so excited I was texting pictures to the wifey. 

With the ribbon motor built, I soldered the screen together and assembled the rest of the mic.  A quick test through a sound devices mixpre confirmed that I had a working mic, and I went to bed exhausted and happy.

So what kind of pride of ownership did I have at the end of this?

Tons.

Cutting and mounting that ribbon required a fair amount of skill, and that skill had to come through repetition.  It really took some stiking with it to make the thing work but knowing that I cut and mounted the ribbon that's translating the air movement into the sounds I'll record through it offers a very high sense of pride and ownership of the process.

With that said, Rick at Austin Microphones has put an incredibly high amount of research and development into this project, and I'm positive that even though I spent a few long evenings putting this mic together, Rick has invested far more hours than I have into the creation of this mic. 

In part 2 I've put up some listening tests through different preamps and with a cloudlifter in line.  The impedance of the preamp actually makes a huge difference on these mics, and I'll share some advice that Rick gave me in some subsequent correspondence regarding that and other things.

In the meantime, here's a much better timelapse of Rick building the mic to completion and testing it over a 2 hour period.


 

it depends: condenser or not?

One of the more important decisions you make when deciding how to record something is what type of mic to use for any given perspective.

My default position tends to be to go with a condenser and then make further decisions from there because condensers are going to (generally) give me the quickest path to a flat, true recording.

In fact, there are times when you have no choice but to use a condenser to get what you're looking for.  Specifically:

• when isolating sources in moderately noisy environments

I use this description because it generally describes the reasons for using interference tube (shotgun) mics, all of which are condensers.  Shotgun mics are essential for extracting interesting sources from noisy environments, and those only come in the condenser flavor of mic.


With that said, there are some important reasons to deviate from the condenser mic perspective:

• when recording super high dBspls

When recording incredibly loud sources many condensers will blow out more quickly because they tend to have higher output than other types of mics.  Loud sources such as weapons and explosions tend to ask for multiple mic setups regardless though, because you'll tend to want to hear that loud sound reverberating out in space.  As such, I'll often pack and record with dynamic mics aimed at the source of loud things and have some condensers out and aimed at the reverberations that those things create.

• when recording super bright subjects

Condensers mics tend to be naturally pretty bright, which is great when recording things in a way that increases their ability to cut through a dense mix.  That strength becomes a weakness when the source is exceptionally bright, however.  Things like metallic impacts and electric shocks can end up sounding a little too brittle and harsh if miked up with something too bright.  Dynamics and ribbons are often good choices for balancing out the brightness of certain harsh source materials.

• when looking for non-linear sounds

Condensers are great for getting realistic representations of the things that they are aimed at, but sound design often requires some not quite true to reality sounding perspectives, and to really go there you'll need some other tools at your disposal.  This is where things like contact mics, electrostatic mics, stethoscope mics, hydrophones and the like come into play.  I'll often roll both a condenser path and a non-linear path and blend the two in post.

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I think a great recording kit can be built with very few mics, and the majority of the weight falls on the condensers.  When recording extreme sounds or looking for non-linear though, it's important to have other tools in the toolbox.

death of the D50?

So a SSD thread today brought to my attention the apparent death of the Sony PCM D50.






I commented in that thread, but I figured I'd elaborate here.

First off, this may just be a weird Sony play to phase out the D50, since it still seems to be listed as available on the pro website:



With that said, its a stark reminder that these things exist at the whims of massive multinational corporations and can be taken from us at a moment's notice.


I can guess what's happening: the PCM M10 is eating up up all of the D50s sales.  Its $200 cheaper, the mics sound better than a lot of the non-D50 market, and the battery life/recording media options are actually superior to the D50s.

IMO, handheld recorders are all about the built in mics, and that (along with the battery life) is where I feel the D50 run circles around the rest of the market.   The primary function of a device like this is to make a good impromptu or low profile recording using the built in mics.   If the D50 is indeed on its way out, I think its a shame because I feel like the D50 is the only handheld recorder in the sub 1k range that has very good internal mics. 


This is not to say that the mics are particularly quiet or neutral (because they're not), but they do a better job than the others in the market at getting something that sounds good and usable in a variety of contexts, and they'll beat the M10's internal mics in most applications.  I've made tons of recordings with my D50's built in mics, and used them in countless projects.  The device is particularly useful for stealth crowd recordings.

In a larger context I'd pay a heck of a lot for a handheld recorder that was made up of Line Audio CM3s for mics, a Sound Devices front end like the mixpre, and an interface and battery life like the D50.  

anyone?

Bueller?