Topic: Advantages/disadvantages of LD mics?

[acidjack]

I have eyed the various AKG 414's on sale in the YS.  Great sounding mics from the shows I've heard with them, and I love the switchable patterns.

Most folks on here use small diaphragm mics, though, rather than mics like these, and I am curious why.  LD mics are larger and obviously they cannot be stealthed or self-mounted (other than one crazy example I read here once), but are there are other reasons to consider or avoid LD mics?

I don't always run open, so that would be a negative consideration for me, but I could possibly convince myself I needed both LD and SD mics, maybe.  It seems to me that LD mics pick up vocals better, for one.   Do they distort more easily or anything like that? 

[page]

Generalities (that I've heard across a number of LDs):

- the diaphragm is bigger, so the resonance (if it's circular which not all) is lower.
- often they appear to have a warmer/colored bottom and bottom/midrange
- sometimes they have a spike around 10k for intelligibility in speech.
- They often are more directional in the top end then in the bottom, so your angle is much more critical and can act as a normal EQ if you get good at it.


I read on DPA's site about LDs once and it seems that they are more sensitive to tiny noises (faint/distant/etc) then SDs which absorb those sounds due to the stiffer diaphragm. I can't find the chart though now.

Different strokes for different folks, or pick the right tool for the right job. I love my LD, but I also now have a set of small SDs.

[nic]

the only downsides I can think of with LDs is size/weight.
the 414s were my preferred mics when I had them.

I prefer the bass response of LDs over SDs

[darby]

multiple patterns were nice when I owned 414s (Fig 8 for Blumlein especially)
great for close mic-ing (subcard)
can be had reasonably priced here and on ebay
good resale value

not so great for making room recordings of PAs like alot of us here do
I did not like the bass response myself... I used the 40 hZ cut alot
way too big when you throw in the shock mounts and windscreens

[H₂O]

SD typically more detailed

LD's are typically designed to use with vocals so they typically roll off on the very highend (above 15K or so) and sometimes on the low end.

LD's offer more patterns for the price but are larger.

SD's are more flexible in usage if you want to spend more money (i.e. active cables, lo-pro usage, same caps can be used for tube bodies/fet bodies/Digital bodies/no bodies (i.e. schoeps))

I was original torn between a pair of Gefel UM900's and Schoeps m222's back when I bought my first set of mics and went with the m222's due to there flexibility (i.e. low pro, can run fet bodies, etc) and the fact that the UM900's rolled off heavy on the lowend and highend.  I have never regretted my decision.

If your taping open all the time, don't care about FOB(in some cases), and want to play around with alot of patterns, the 414's is a good starting point.

[nic]

not so great for making room recordings of PAs like alot of us here do
I did not like the bass response myself... I used the 40 hZ cut alot

why did you find them not good for room/PA recordings? I found them fantastic - depending on room acoustics and FOH mixing.
I found M/S with the subcard to be my fav pattern with them.

for the music I recorded if I ran a HPF, even at 40Hz, I would be loosing actual music!

[darby]

not so great for making room recordings of PAs like alot of us here do
I did not like the bass response myself... I used the 40 hZ cut alot

why did you find them not good for room/PA recordings? I found them fantastic - depending on room acoustics and FOH mixing.
I found M/S with the subcard to be my fav pattern with them.

for the music I recorded if I ran a HPF, even at 40Hz, I would be loosing actual music!

well nic...
maybe the shows you attend must have the most pristine acoustics
and the best FOH that ever walked the Earth
unfortunately the ones myself and most people I know, DON'T 

I record music that I listen to on MY stereo.. no music LOST on MY recordings

I sold my 414s after 3 years and never plan on going back due to the disadvantages that I listed
as a matter of fact I have owned my 451s for nearly 20 years now
and use the 460s in situations I might have used the 414s

[nic]

not so great for making room recordings of PAs like alot of us here do
I did not like the bass response myself... I used the 40 hZ cut alot

why did you find them not good for room/PA recordings? I found them fantastic - depending on room acoustics and FOH mixing.
I found M/S with the subcard to be my fav pattern with them.

for the music I recorded if I ran a HPF, even at 40Hz, I would be loosing actual music!

well nic...
maybe the shows you attend must have the most pristine acoustics
and the best FOH that ever walked the Earth
unfortunately the ones myself and most people I know, DON'T 

I record music that I listen to on MY stereo.. no music LOST on MY recordings

I sold my 414s after 3 years and never plan on going back due to the disadvantages that I listed
as a matter of fact I have owned my 451s for nearly 20 years now
and use the 460s in situations I might have used the 414s

hey now, no need to be condescending...
a shitty room/mix is a shitty room/mix, no matter what gear you are using! no where did I state that I had that good fortune of that hapening on even the majority of my recording chances. what I'm saying is that if given a good sounding room and mix, I found the LDs to give me a better pull than SDs. that is all.

I should have stated that I tend to record more electronic style music in my reference to losing music when using a HPF. a bass guitar or kick drum cant create a big fat 30Hz tone! with a typical rock band, any information down that low on the Hz scale is typically room ambience or AC rumbling, etc...not music.

[jnorman34]

mshilarious has detailed the basic issues well.  the only other thing i would mention is coloration - LDCs tend to have a more colored sound than SDCs, due to the differences in transient response and off axis response mentioned above.  for loud rock venues, LDCs seem to do a perfectly fine job, and the multiple patterns available on LDCS, such as the 414s and AT4050s and others, offer nice control to compensate for your location in regard to the sound source.  typically, those trying to capture more subtle acoustic music will prefer SDCs due to better transient response and off axis characteristics.

[stevetoney]

I also agree that mshilarious has provided the best response to this question.  I particularly agree with the comments about transient response and what that contributes to the end result.  I also agree with the comment that it's not necessarily correct to generalize that LDs provide any specific frequency response or have any specific character versus SD mics...LDs vary in character across the board just as SD mics to. 

What I would particularly agree with though is that, due to the sum total of the characteristics that mshilarious pointed out, my experiences were that I got less consistent results with LD mics than I get with SD mics and that was a bit frustrating. 

[twatts (pants are so over-rated...)]

Honestly, almost everything MSH said went over the top of my head.  Laugh at me if you want, but I don't care...

I look at it from a utilitarian sense:  I love the functionality and sound of my ADK TLs, but hate the size.  But I can't find an SD mic that I like that has the options that my ADK TLs have, at least in the same price range.  I'd love to get AKGs, but to get the 4x patterns, I'd be spending a ton on capsules...

But I'm just a jackass, so what do I know...

Terry

[page]

I look at it from a utilitarian sense:  I love the functionality and sound of my ADK TLs, but hate the size.

What I would particularly agree with though is that, due to the sum total of the characteristics that mshilarious pointed out, my experiences were that I got less consistent results with LD mics than I get with SD mics and that was a bit frustrating.

I agree with both of these. It can be a real challenge to milk a great tape out of my LD, but, when I do, I looove the end result because of the coloring that is unique to that LD.

[DSatz]

Hi. I posted in this thread during a time when my day job had me in a state of great anxiety, and my focus here was lousy. Begging the forum's pardon, I'm rewriting some of my old messages.

Every condenser microphone has an amplifier circuit, and every amplifier circuit has some inherent noise. The one and only possible technical advantage of a larger diaphragm is--all other things being equal--greater capacitance, which means a greater ability to shunt (i.e. reduce) the input noise of whatever active device (tube, FET) comes first in the circuit. This is why the first commercially available condenser microphones for studios back in the late 1920s were large-diaphragm: All active circuitry was tube back then, and low-noise tubes hadn't been invented yet.

Now, in reality that all-important "all other things being equal" proviso can't be relied upon at all. A microphone with a large-diaphragm capsule may be no quieter than any given small-diaphragm microphone that you might be considering; it may even be noisier. For a number of reasons (cost being a big one) most microphones aren't as quiet as they could be, and the amount of extra noise they each have is a real variable. The world's quietest microphones are large-diaphragm, but the quietest small-diaphragm microphones are quieter than many large-diaphragm microphones.

The thing is, for most people who do live recording, the noise levels of the venues where we record exceed the inherent noise levels of our microphones significantly, so we never hear the noise of the microphones. Thus the one technical advantage that a large-diaphragm microphone could have doesn't matter audibly to us, even if that potential is fully realized.

Before I leave the topic of noise, I have to say that the spec-sheet comparisons that we can make as consumers are fundamentally unreliable. This is a widely recognized problem within the industry. A-weighted rms figures are worse than useless; don't even bother looking at them.

But even the best manufacturers don't measure microphone noise the same way. A few years ago, a working group of the AES sent a set of a dozen microphones around to various manufacturers (including Neumann, Schoeps, AKG, DPA, AudioTechnica and others), and asked them each to measure them and report on what they found. The noise measurements varied by up to 6 dB for the same individual microphones. Those were the results that the most honest, serious manufacturers got with the best equipment and procedures, while all the other manufacturers on the committee were watching and comparing the outcomes. And there certainly are manufacturers whose marketing departments aren't as scrupulous as these engineers were.

--best regards

P.S.: I also have to say that all other supposed advantages that are claimed for large-diaphragm microphones, in this thread or elsewhere, are either illusory or just plain wrong. The prime example of that is their (supposedly) better bass response. I'll get to that in another message, though.

[kirk97132]

Here's a transcription of a old but loved topic from another board, technical but not too technical.  And DSatz even wrote some of it!

http://www.itrstudio.com/MIC_CHAT.PDF

THanks for that.

And, a big thank you to yourself, Mr. Satz and all the others like you who have knowledge lightyears beyond mine and freely share it. 

[WiFiJeff]

Similarly there are so many customers nowadays who expect a large-diaphragm construction to bring "individual character" to the sound that there is little economic incentive to produce a large-diaphragm microphone that is as sonically neutral as possible. Thus in an almost post-modern way, the beliefs and expectations of the average customer tend to become self-fulfilling in many cases, which in turn fuels those beliefs, and so on. That's probably not so good for the sound quality of recorded music in the long run.

--best regards

Speaking of this, I have used for several years (up to and including last night) Josephson C617 omnis with the LD Gefell caps.  I find these detailed and accurate, but your point is well taken as I have never seen anyone else using them.  (I am also big on the AKG C426B stereo mic in Blumlein configuration).

Jeff

Jeff

[DSatz]

Continuing my earlier post: The whole notion that large-diaphragm microphones pick up "better" bass or "more" bass because of their size is completely mistaken. When people make generalizations about "better" or "warmer" bass from large-diaphragm microphones, they are usually talking about a cardioid pattern and a dual-diaphragm capsule design. Very few large-diaphragm microphones are single-diaphragm, and the difference in the way the pattern is obtained matters greatly. As you go down in frequency, dual-diaphragm cardioids aren't cardioids any more; their patterns broaden out at low frequencies, often quite considerably. Thus they are picking up additional low-frequency energy from around the room, even from the back of the microphone where a cardioid shouldn't be sensitive.

But that's dual-diaphragm behavior, not large-diaphragm behavior; for better or worse, small-diaphragm microphones with dual-diaphragm capsules have the same characteristic. As an example, I've attached the polar diagram for the cardioid setting of the classic Neumann KM 56 small-diaphragm microphone, which had a dual-diaphragm capsule and three switchable patterns. Compare this to the polar diagram of any good single-diaphragm cardioid and you'll immediately see the difference in low-frequency pickup from off-axis. A good single-diaphragm cardioid can still be a real cardioid at 100 Hz or even 50 Hz.

It's one thing if you're close-miking something or someone in a studio with a cardioid, and quite another thing if you're making a stereo recording with a coincident or closely spaced pair of them. In the studio situation the spreading out of the pattern can be a good thing (warmth, roundness) but in the stereo situation it's a disaster: The low frequencies become more and more mono, which undermines the whole sense of spaciousness in the recording.

So this is one direct answer to the original poster about why most people here are using small-diaphragm condensers, apart from logistical reasons such as lower weight or the visual aspect: It's because we're recording in stereo with two main microphones (or two microphones, period), and in that kind of recording the consistency of the microphones' directional pattern across the frequency range is crucial, and large-diaphragm microphones (especially the most common kinds, which are dual-diaphragm) are never as good in that repect.

--best regards

[stevetoney]

Here's a transcription of a old but loved topic from another board, technical but not too technical.  And DSatz even wrote some of it!

http://www.itrstudio.com/MIC_CHAT.PDF

THanks for that.

And, a big thank you to yourself, Mr. Satz and all the others like you who have knowledge lightyears beyond mine and freely share it.

X2...I actually saved the .pdf on my machine and may print it for some coffee table reading (obviously deserves a better place in the house than my Relix magazines, which are bathroom reading.  LOL.)

[airbladder]

A lot of this is over my head.  I have SD and LD mics.  I like the LD's because I can get 5 patterns for less cash.  Now I am using U89s and the size is never and issue for me.  One thing that is nice about the 89s is that they are internally shock mounted, this gives you the ability to use ring mounts.  With out big shock mounts the mic size is less of an issue for me. 
I like the sound of LD mics.  Not sure if LD is better or worse than SD mics.  This reminds me I should do a good A/B between my u89s and km184s. 

[DSatz]

mshilarious, the very first example that I looked up just now, to check whether I was tripping or not, was the Neumann KM 84 vs. U 87. These two microphones were the paradigms of their respective categories when I was starting out as an engineer. The U 87 is hardly an inexpensive microphone, but the small-diaphragm KM 84 had the (slightly) lower noise figure.

Neumann reduced the noise of the U 87's amplifier by 4 dB some 20 years after it was introduced, and also increased its sensitivity by some 5 dB--which is interesting in the context of this discussion since the size of the diaphragm didn't change at all!

My point is that unless the extra trouble and expense is taken, as with the U 87[A], we can't assume that a large-diaphragm microphone will be quieter or more sensitive simply because it is large-diaphragm. Since the vast majority of microphones don't have optimal electronics attached, such assumptions don't hold up in practice. High sensitivity and ultra-low-noise performance have never been reasons for many people to choose one microphone over another, and manufacturers know this.

--best regards

P.S.: Definitely, the best impulse response performance comes from small-diaphragm, single-diaphragm condenser microphones that operate as pressure transducers. This isn't a matter of "fast" vs. "slow," though (which I think is a kind of audiophile myth); it's more like "clean" vs. "dirty."

[DSatz]

But mshilarious, I'm not saying that there's no relation between diaphragm size and equivalent noise. I'm saying that the economic realities being what they are--and given the fact that most users evidently don't feel that they really need a microphone to have the lowest possible noise--only a smallish minority of microphones are built to achieve the lowest possible noise (to within, say, 2 or 3 dB). Thus any buyer of a large-diaphragm microphone who doesn't bother to check out its actual noise specification can't safely assume that he's getting a quieter microphone on account of its having a large-diaphragm capsule. I'd be amazed if you would dispute that statement--and you'd be in error if you did.

The same goes for sensitivity, which depends on many variables that are essentially unrelated to the capsule. You can take the same capsule and put it into different (complete) microphones and get basically any sensitivity you want within a very wide range.

The requirement of "all other things being equal" is rarely met in practice, so certain of the generalizations that you listed are often misleading, even though there is something to them in the aggregate. It's just that individual people don't buy or use the aggregate of all possible microphones; they buy and use particular ones that are actually made and sold, and those often don't fit some of the generalizations that you listed.

Other generalizations that you listed were spot on, though. I've got to go right now, but if it isn't boring everyone to tears I could come back and say more about them--the ones having to do with directional response and high frequency response, mainly.

[twatts (pants are so over-rated...)]

I think this is a great discussion, even if I don't understand much of it...  At least it gives me beginning point if I really want to learn the Art of Mics.  Thanks very much to DS and MSH! 

Terry

[yug du nord]

As an owner of both large and small diaphragm mics, I really appreciate this info from you fellas.....  good stuff!

[DSatz]

(I've been going back and rewriting some of my postings because I was embarrassed at my wordiness. This posting was almost completely redundant, so I'm replacing it with something different that I should have said in the first place.)

When any object is placed in the path of sound waves, even if it's a microphone whose purpose is to register those sound waves as accurately as possible, it will disturb or distort the very thing that it is trying to respond to. This disturbance depends on the object's shape, but will generally become significant when the object is half a wavelength or larger in any of its dimensions.

Music contains a mixture of frequencies that span a 1000:1 ratio and therefore the physical wavelengths of sound span a 1:1000 ratio (wavelength and frequency are inversely proportional). Since sound travels in air at about 1100 feet per second, one wavelength at 1100 Hz = one foot. A one-inch "object" is therefore a concern at around 6.6 kHz and above; a two-inch "object" starts obstructing things at around 3.3 kHz, and so on (this is simplified, of course).

So this leads to two conclusions about microphones: Even the ones we call "small" are acoustically large at the highest audio frequencies; also, large microphones trip over themselves throughout the whole upper midrange and high frequency range, whicle small microphones can at least be out of their own way in the midrange and below, which is where most of the sound energy is.

(More later.)

[DSatz]

(message withdrawn by its author, who was really too tired to be allowed near a keyboard at the time)