Pro Mic versus Homemade Mic Tested

[Bill Phillips]

This video, made by a musician with time on his hands, and showing testing he did to compare a bunch of mics, was posted on the Production Expert blog. I'm sure a lot of you have seen it.

But I decided to post it here because it's shows so clearly what the overall frequency response differences are and, if you want the graphs, he suggests that you can pause the video on the graphs you want and take a screenshot.

 

There's probably plenty of other differences, which may or may not be important, that he doesn't discuss; but I think his work provides really useful information for selecting mics to buy and use.

[mettelus]

There was a site posted a while back to give you insight into the frequency response of various mics using the same audio. I forget where it was offhand, but the real takeaway is that frequency response is sort of moot with proper EQ (what that site was actually doing was overlaying the mic-specific response curves over the audio samples). Adequate signal-to-noise ratio tends to be more important so that you can isolate the signal and tailor it accordingly. As long as the frequency content was captured, one can process it at will.