AT is generally very good gear for the money, but I always wonder why anyone would decide in advance that they want large-diaphragm microphones and then shop around for which ones to get. For live performance recording, a large diaphragm (as such) gets you no advantages and some serious disadvantages. Everyone knows that, I hope. The only way it makes sense to use them (unless you imagine them to have some kind of coolness factor, which I can understand) is if you know a particular one that happens to be right, in your opinion, for a particular application.
Otherwise you can try one after another until the cows come home, and they'll each be a little different, or sometimes a lot different. Modern mass-market large-diaphragm mikes generally have a frequency response tailored for "tracking"--as a single mike set close on a vocal soloist or an acoustic guitar, for example, which is going to be mixed in to a multi-track assemblage. The direct sound tends to dominate in that kind of pickup. But if you put them in an environment with a significant amount of reflected sound energy they tend to behave very differently in different acoustical environments, since they have directional patterns that vary so much in different frequency ranges. When you go from show to show and set up pairs in places with different acoustical characteristics, you never know in advance what kind of pickup behavior you'll get.
Again, if that's your thrill, then go on down the endless list. But most of the ones on the market any more are attempted clones of the Neumann U 47 or U 87 or the AKG C 12, so do yourself a favor and rent a pair of the real thing some time. They're great classics, but their sonic characteristics (maybe with the exception of the U 87) aren't too useful for the kind of semi-distant two-mike stereo recording most people here are into. They're mostly too bright and forward sounding for our purposes, and that's by deliberate, painstaking design by the way--it's not simply due to their diaphragm size. (Again the U 87 is considerably less so than the others, illustrating the point that "large-diaphragmness" per se tells you nothing about what the sound will be like.)
I hope this doesn't just come across as an ideological rant. I'm not trying to irritate anyone or to provoke discussion, which Lord knows isn't something that the world needs more of; I'm trying to put out some facts. For studio recording with a single mike (or several separately tracked mono mikes) per sound source, you can use just about anything--wax paper on a comb, if you like the effect. But when you're trying to get two microphones to work together as a unit for stereo pickup, you need for their polar patterns to be uniform across the audio frequency spectrum, and for that, even conventional "small-diaphragm" microphones are already something of a compromise. Around 6 - 8 kHz and above there's some stuff that it would be better if it weren't there, which with larger microphones starts an octave lower because of the whole wavelength thing. So heading off in this general direction is is unlikely to work out to your advantage unless you're going somewhere particular for a reason, is all I'm saying.
--best regards
Topic: AT2020 LD Mics - Opinions? (Read 1364 times)