Many of us are probably interested in Jon's new very inexpensive, yet very versatile, X-R line of mics. I have installed them in a local venue and got to test drive them for the first time the other night. I thought it might be useful, as a reference point, to compare them against my Schoeps MK5s which were also installed in roughly the same location. My personal conclusions:
- These are very nice mics for the money
- If you get them, either order attenuators or ask Jon to mod them to be not too hot. My versions are the ones that have no bodies and instead terminate in PFAs at the end of 3ft cables. Plugged into the DR-40, with the input volume all the way down at zero, they still clipped some.
Why this comp is "totally invalid", so we don't have to have that conversation:
- Placement. The Schoeps were DIN on a kwonbar on a standard mount. The Naiants were taped down to the edges of the projector ledge the Schoeps were clamped to. So while both were pretty close in terms of vertical spacing (maybe half a foot or so), the Schoeps were spaced much more tightly and traditionally than the Naiants. The Naiants were at something like a super-wide NOS.
- Gear chain. Schoeps were Schoeps MK5 (cardiods, DIN)>KCY>PFA>USBPre2>R-44. The Naiants (also cardiods) were plugged directly into a Tascam DR-40. This may totally bug some of you, but it doesn't bug me because, well, I wasn't really setting out to prove that nice $150 homemade mics were the equivalent of or better than $4000 Schoeps - I just wanted potential buyers of the Naiants to have something to compare to.
I did no processing other than normalizing to -0.1dB. The Naiant sample still has higher overall RMS though.
So that as many folks as possible will check this out, I'm offering this in a few different formats, including totally invalid lossy ones:
FLAC sample 1:
http://tinyurl.com/byjm2flFLAC sample 2:
http://tinyurl.com/a7og89h[Right-click then "Save As" to download]
MP3 sample 1:
http://tinyurl.com/bawbo3xMP3 sample 2:
http://tinyurl.com/abdhxeq[Click and they'll stream]
Soundcloud: (horribly lossy, but much easier to check out)
https://soundcloud.com/acidjacknyc/sets/naiant-x-r-vs-schoeps-mk5-comp