Microphones/A Perspective

graywolf

graywolf

Well-known member
I was sitting here at the computer playing solitaire when I should have been doing something useful like vacuuming the living room, with my mind wandering. It wandered to microphone reviews and why they sometimes seem so strange...

It was then that I realized that while I look at microphones as a technician, many look at them as an artist.

To give you an idea of what I am talking about, one of my favorite microphones is the Audio-Technica ATM10A. When you read reviews it seems like it is universally hated. Why? Well, I have read that AT developed this microphone specifically to record grand piano. Now a grand piano has a tremendous frequency range from the bearly hearable on the bottom to the unperceivable on the top with each octave exactly alike. OK, I exaggerate a bit there. But the point is the ATM10A (and its replacement the AT8010) was designed to be flat from 20cps to 20,000cps. What goes in is what comes out. In fact I sometimes use mine as a measurement mic.

As a technician I really appreciate that precision. But to an artist it is sterile, it has no color. They have a sound in their mind, they want a mic to produce that sound, not one to reproduce an existing sound, but one to make a new sound. A voice artist looks for a microphone that makes his/her voice sound like they imagine it sounds. A musician want a mic to make his instrument sound like it does too him. A recording artist wants mics that make his mix "interesting".

As a video sound technician you are, maybe, about half and half. If your sound does not sound a lot like what the director heard, you are in trouble!!! On the other hand, he probably did not hear it exactly as it really sounded, so you have some latitude.

The point of all this is that you can not really go by what those artist types say. A mic that sounds like dynamite to them, may be way too colored for realistic use. So use you own ears to make final decisions about which mic to use.
 
I can't speak for others, but I suspect that many will agree:

Most spoken word audio for video is best recorded without much if any color. Most if not all of my mics and my recording chain are chosen with the purpose of accuracy and not color. If I want color, I'll add that later and prefer my original sound file to be as neutral as possible. Now obviously, each mic and each voice has a personality, and I might chose a mic that would sound better with a female voice for example. But that's about as far as it goes doing corporate work. Music recordists delve deeply into certain mics for certain people and instruments and that's more where the artist elements occur.
 
Folks in music are probably a lot more interested in a neutral sound. The one thing I will take issue with is the concept of "reality" and "accuracy". Neither really exist for a recording anymore than they do for a photograph.

There are a couple of reasons. First in reality you hear a sound in an environment and that environment is probably not your living room or a movie theatre or wherever you are watching on your tablet. Change the environment and you change the sound. Also whatever you hear or see is just data that is then transformed into sight and sound in that big computer/ filter called your brain. Two people in the same space hear the same sound differently, always. Even if you recreated a 100% accurate reproduction of a sound you can't recreate the environment and the context of the situation.

In narrative film sound post the goal is not "accuracy" it is to create the environment and context of the world of the story. Part of that is to imitate the actions that your brain would take by eliminating things that are not important and making important stuff more prominent.

The sound of a tractor sounds like a tractor with a shot of a construction site and like a tank with a shot of a battle field. Which is "real"?

So how that relates to mics is that I have a lot. I have old crystal "fight" mics and contact mics. In our Foley stage we have a mic we use for female FS (when we are doing them) that softens out our "guy" feet. I also have some good wide range mics that are pretty sensitive because often with FX you want as much info as possible so you can manipulate it in post.

The other thing I have learned is that nothing sounds like people think it does so recording the "real" thing is often not very useful.

An archivist would probably argue for the flattest most "realistic" sound but I'm not paid to be an archivist I'm paid to make the story's world seem real.
 
IMHO, the only people who want "color" in a microphone are studio recordists. Most of their music is recorded one instrument / singer at a time and layered to build up a "song". They typically start with a drum set which they will close mic to death (I've heard of 14+ mics on a drum set, most within a few cm of the drum head / cymbal, and some inside the drums (kick)). Then a bass track. Then guitars. Etc. The musicians don't have to even know each other, or even be in the same hemisphere with each other. The collaboration isn't between the musicians as they play, it's between the producers and the individual musicians, and then between the producers and the mixer(s).

But under these generally close-mic-and-eliminate-the-room conditions it can make some sense to spend some time finding a mic with the right "color" to work well with a given voice or guitar cab. And preamps that work well with said mic, to "bring out the color" as it were.

Then there's the rest of us. Whether we are recording dialog, or acoustic ensembles in performance halls, or doing measurements in anechoic chambers, color is unacceptable. We want a mic that's as clean and uncolored as we can get, especially in off-axis performance. Because unlike the studio, off-axis performance means something to us.

For example, look at a stereo recording technique called ORTF. ORTF makes it's stereo image from the off-axis response of a pair of cardioid mics with a specific spacing (17 cm) and a specific enclosed angle (110 degrees). ORTF gets used to record entire symphony orchestras; none of the recorded sound is on-axis to both mics and a very small percentage is on-axis to just one of the mics. A highly colored mic pair would make ORTF unlistenable.
 
Well, except for Noiz' SFX, and I would say that is an "artist's" type of recording, it kind of looks like my point is agreed with here.

The problem, Bruce, is that most of the stuff we read about microphones on the web is from that Studio Recordist, or at least wanabees, viewpoint. Actually, I find that these forums (DVXuser.com), are about the most neutral when talking about microphones. But even in video we see where the male voice is often shifted far torward the bass, and the female voice is shifted to the upper mid's, so we are not immune to that kind of thing. I mean how many people do you know who sound like they are talking inside a kettle drum?

Also, in instrumental music the overtones are important, a mic that would actually go to 40K or so would give the best recording. We do not need that. In fact the Electrovoice 635A rolled off drastically at 10K, but then its place was really in AM broadcasting where the cutoff frequency was 5K. That is a good rule of thumb, you want a recording chain that can do about twice what your final output needs to have for maximum fidelity. Why? Because that means you are recording only in the flat part of the chain. On the other hand, we are certainly influenced by what we are used to. Being an old fart I love the sound of good cassette recorders (I still own three of them), for instance. I suspect that many of us old ones feel the same way, while to the young folks cassettes are utter junk.

The point of all this is, take microphone reviews with a tablespoon full of salt, especially the ones that brag about how magic the sound from it is.
 
"while to the young folks cassettes are utter junk"
- but they're perfectly happy with a low res MP3 over they're awful sounding expensive designer headphones, which are so far from having a 'flat' response it's ridiculous. Though I never was a huge fan of the cassette format aside for the convenience opposed to R-R. Sorry to rant off OT.
 
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