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What I'm trying to understand is *why* I do not like the DPA 406x. The frequency response should not be the problem. I expect all reasonable mics to be "flat enough" for what we are doing (recording rock music!). I'm thinking there is something else, perhaps harmonic distortion (?) on the upper end of the response that is making it sound bad. I don't believe in magic. There should be some acoustic (or psychoacoustic) explanation for the sound.
Richard,
indeed this is the ever ongoing quest for knowledge.
Some reflections on this, I have been down a lot of paths in trying to understand my own taste, often without beeing able to really pinpoint the cause.
It might have a lot of reasons coupled to lacks of the mics as such. No mic has a perfect frequency response, all mics add distortion in different ways. And it might be that your ears are extra sensitive to exactly the faults of this mic.
It might however be totally different reasons. One of them is how you actually use the mic. This might not be the best mic for your exact usage , "best" in this case trying to referr to some kind of objective quality . It might be that the mic is too much omni or whatever for what you record. Things that in some circumstances are "good" and in other "bad" . ( Please note quotes, this is a difficult subject to nail totally right in words ) . It could alse be in combination with your recording equipment which might interface better with other mics. Perhaps the 406x really wants more than x Volts and you equipment supplies less which other mics are perfectly happy with. Or any other circumstance like that.
It might also be a completely different reason, maybe the mic is simply too good in the wrong areas. As we know, all mics modify the sound somehow. This becomes part of the recording and can have a large effect on what we here. One example might be the Neumann U47, long time discontinued, which sells for fantasy money and is used in top-level studios. From most aspects this is a rather bad mic with high noise level, a crooked frequency response. And yet it adds that something extra that makes it a favourite tool. Maybe your other mics has something of that same quality, really adding "distortion" which simply makes things sound better to you in your usage. It is all about usage and taste I believe. ( Sort of like wine, sometimes red wine goes better, sometimes white, and then there are lots of different ones to choose from ) .
Or it might be a totally different reason, more going with preconceived notions. I have been down that road too many times to be surprised. Sometimes the brain simply decides on something beeing better or worse. It takes a lot of work to pass that barrier and make the mind doing a true unbiased comparison. Quite often we do not really test things in an unbiased head-to-head way. I might test a mic in a really bad room and forever calling that mic colored compared to my other mic that was run in a better room. Or any amount of reasons not really falling in the "objective" part of the world.
The bottom line though is that there definitely is one part that is about taste. Which is good enough for me really to make most of my choices.
// Gunnar