Topic: Audio Technica AT899 mini omnis?

[jbou]

I have been searching here and can't find any info on these mics and could only find one show on the archive listing them. I'm curious, is there a reason people don't use them? I havn't heard them, but AT tends to make good mics and they are close to Countryman B3s in price.

[goodcooker]

maybe this is why...from the product description

"Audio-Technica's omnidirectional AT899 is engineered for intelligible, accurate voice reproduction"

[jbou]

Ah... didn't seen that. I had only looked at the specs. The frequency response is sort of flat except for the bump around 12k hz. Is that what makes them geared towards voice reproduction?

[Ziggz]

How about the BP896's? They look super-small, was wondering how they compare to B3's?

[DSatz]

I don't know about these specific mikes, though I agree about A-T as a solid quality brand.

But super-small microphones, all other things being equal, have noticeably higher noise levels than the more usual 20 or 21 or 22 mm-diameter small-diaphragm condensers. This is because in a condenser microphone, sensitivity is directly proportional to capsule capacitance, and capacitance in turn is directly proportional to the active surface area of the membrane and backplate. But in any circle the area is proportional to the square of the diameter. So if one capsule has a 1/2" diameter and another one has only a 1/4" diameter, the 1/4" capsule will have 1/4 the active surface area of the 1/2" capsule (or less), and thus 1/4 the capacitance all else being equal.

So there is a real, practical limit on how small a capsule can be and still offer the full dynamic range needed for high-quality music recording--which is part of why 99+% of the microphones used in professional recording studios aren't super-small. Even people like me who are real partisans for small-diaphragm as opposed to large-diaphragm condensers don't generally have much interest in super-small microphones, unless they have to be concealed.

The other thing about pressure transducers is, with the usual size omni mike, the high-frequency pickup (say, above 5 -8 kHz) is markedly directional. With super-small omnis this tends not to be the case so much--the start of the directional range can be very near the top of the audible range. That isn't either necessarily good nor necessarily bad; it depends on the absorptive characteristics of the space you're recording in. But it calls for a bit of an adjustment in how you think about microphone placement. In the relatively few places where I prefer to use omnis, I'm fairly sure that I prefer the off-axis "shading" effect--I want the reflected sound to be somewhat rolled off at the top. But different people have different sets of expectations, so YMMV.

--best regards