Topic: Mid-priced omnis?

[jnorman34]

Hiya  - i currently am using a pair of AT4050s set to omni for the chamber ensemble work i do.  i was wondering if switching over to a pair of true pressure omnis might be an improvement due to better bass response.  so, if any of you have experience with this, or even just a reasonable opinion about omnis, i would like to hear from you.

i cannot afford the schoeps cmc6/mk2 (free field) setup i might like, or km131s, or senn mkh20s, or DPA 4006s, so i would need recommendations on a mid priced omni setup - perhaps km183s (thought they have a significant high end rise which may not be good fo classical work), or DPA 4090s (too much self noise for classical?), charter oak m900 (never heard em), etc...

so - will true pressure omnis in that price range be any kind of improvement over my AT4050s?  if so, which mics might you recommend?  danke.

[John Willett]

The new Sennheiser MKH 8020 are about 35% cheaper than the MKH 20 and you save by buying a matched pair (£100 cheaper in the UK), you may find that these just come within reach of your budget.

The Neumann KM 183 are diffuse-field omnis which some people find a bit bright.  However, I recorded solo piano with the digital version of these recently and it was fine.  As the mics were only a couple of metres away from the piano, I tamed the top end by rotating the mics so the direct sound was 90-degrees off-axis - here they were flat.

It's quite amazing the change in the sound just by tilting the mics up - have a listen - this way you can "tune" until you get the response you want.

At the cheap end, the Røde NT-55 are good little mics (or the NT-5 + the optional omni heads from the 55 bought separately).

[stirinthesauce]

avenson audio sto-2

Loved them.  The 4050's are mighty nice as well.  Have used both AT's and the avenson for orchestral/chamber.  Dirk and I even used the avenson's on a carillon.  Saved our butts!

Believe Dirk (TNJazz) on here is an authorized vendor.  Very reasonably priced, deadicated omni.

edit to add:  Some folks will chime in that the avenson's are noisy. Not so.  Never, even in the quietest passages with high gain, have I ever audibly noticed the self noise.

[ghellquist]

I definitely agree that the Neumann KM183-s are worth looking at. As John said before they are voiced to be used far away from the sound source (the technical term is diffuse sound field), and if you get closer they may sound bright. This is easily cured by turning them a bit off axis, or if you preferr it by a small bit of EQ. Chances though is that you will like the sound as it is.

Another alternative might be the Octava MK012. They have a reputation for beeing quite inconsistent though, over the years they have had quite varying quality control. And there was also briefly a Chinese made ripoff, so be a bit aware.

Gunnar

[0vu]

Hiya  - i currently am using a pair of AT4050s set to omni for the chamber ensemble work i do.  i was wondering if switching over to a pair of true pressure omnis might be an improvement due to better bass response.  so, if any of you have experience with this, or even just a reasonable opinion about omnis, i would like to hear from you.

Do you specialise in any particular type of chamber music and/or work only/mostly in specific venues/types of acoustic?  (E.g piano trios in recital rooms/brass dectets in churches/20 piece ensembles in cathedrals)? And more importantly, what kind of sound do/don't you like (close and intimate/sitting amongst the players/more distant 'audience perspective'/ultra detailed, tight, and clear/warmer, rounder, fuller/hyper realistic/more impressionistic/etc., etc.)?

The AT4050s are nice mics; are you looking for alternatives because there's something specific about them that you don't like/which they don't give you, or more out of curiosity as to what else is out there?

It isn't only the LF response that changes with a switch from a switchable, dual diaphragm LDC in omni to a SDC pressure transducer. Noise levels can change (which may or may not be relevant, according to what you record, in what circumstances, and just how noisy/not are the mics) but for me the biggest difference (normally) is in the way in which the polar pattern changes with frequency and it can make a quite a difference to how you use them and the results you get.

i cannot afford the schoeps cmc6/mk2 (free field) setup i might like, or km131s, or senn mkh20s, or DPA 4006s, so i would need recommendations on a mid priced omni setup - perhaps km183s (thought they have a significant high end rise which may not be good fo classical work), or DPA 4090s (too much self noise for classical?), charter oak m900 (never heard em), etc...

The HF rise on things like the 183/130/MK2S etc. can be useful in come circumstances, even on chamber music but if your main application is in clearer/drier acoustics, or you favour a more intimate sound, or simply don't like brighter sounding recordings, it can be a problem. Re-angling the mics always gives a useful degree of control but being forced into it as a starting point is far from ideal as extreme re-angling, such as pointing the mics 90 degrees off axis can bring other problems. It's more a 'get out of trouble' solution suggested, for example when you have to do a piano recording, want to try some digital mics but the only ones available are uncomfortably bright (eh, John ). If you're buying/hiring/whatever a pair of mics for a specific purpose, it seems to me an odd choice to me to get something that you know is wrong from the start, even if there is a work around; it's just piling a compromise on top of a compromise/fix for a problem you didn't have.

so - will true pressure omnis in that price range be any kind of improvement over my AT4050s? 

They'll likely be 'different' but whether or not it's an 'improvement' is another matter. If it were a change with a no compromise/anything goes budget, then I'd say it'd be possible to find overall improvements amongst the possible differences; swapping to something on a much tighter budget, I think, is going to be more of a case of trading differences - hence asking what kind of sound you like/areas you work in, and whether you're trying to change/fix something specific or just looking for a bit of a change.

[jlykos]

Microtech Gefell SMS2000 bodies with M27 omni capsules.

[DSatz]

jnorman, others have rushed in to recommend their favorite pressure microphones, but your basic question hasn't been addressed directly. In my opinion it's a maybe. For most chamber music recording the extended low-frequency response of a pressure microphone would affect the hall sound more than the pickup of most instruments, because most of those instruments don't go low enough. You'd hear other differences simply because you'd be using different microphones, and those differences might well be more important than the low frequency extension as such.

It's not just a matter of low-frequency response extension, but also of the sensitivity throughout the lower midrange (say, 120 - 300 Hz). Published frequency response curves for pressure-gradient microphones generally include some amount of low-frequency increase due to proximity effect. The standards say that they're not supposed to, but as far as I'm aware, in practice they all do, and have pretty much always done so. If a published graph is flat down to 50 - 100 Hz (typically measured at the equivalent of one meter distance), then for a 5-meter miking distance, the microphones will have some degree of rolloff below the published curve if they're of the pressure gradient type.

Thus with pressure omnis there will very likely be greater low-midrange sensitivity (for more distant sound sources) than with your present microphones, because proximity effect typically boosts the whole lower midrange as well as the lowest frequencies. Otherwise you'd never hear proximity effect in female speaking voices, but everyone knows that you do.

Fortunately it is somewhat easier to build a pressure transducer of a certain level of quality than a pressure gradient transducer of equivalent quality. About all I can say about which mike to buy is that you should have many possible choices at every price level. Some omni dynamic microphones (e.g. Beyer, Sennheiser) can be very nice sounding, too--don't exclude them necessarily.

Do keep in mind that the high-frequency response shown for a pressure microphone is not the "audible response" it will have in a reverberant environment; that depends greatly on your miking distance and on the characteristics of the hall. Unless you're close-miking (which I hope you're not having to do in chamber music), in a reverberant space a pressure microphone needs a few dB of on-axis lift at high frequencies in order to sound clear and neutral at moderate miking distances, where about half the sound energy is reaching the mikes from off-axis.

I frankly wouldn't choose a microphone which is fully "diffuse-field corrected" (6 - 8 dB apparent peak in the published graph) such as the Neumann KM 183/130 or the Schoeps MK 3--I've used those for classical recording and it's just too much. It's not excessive brightness, since brightness generally occurs an octave or two lower in frequency; it just sounds wrong, unless used at far greater distances than you would typically use for stereo recording of small ensembles. Those capsule types are generally holdovers from the mono era; imagine recording the Berlin Philharmonic and chorus through a single microphone--it would be distinctly farther away than you or I would place microphones for stereo. 3 or 4 dB of apparent on-axis rise is more like it, and if possible, the response should be more like a plateau rather than a peak followed by a dropoff.

--best regards

[GDfan]

AKG 392s ?

[Bernd Out]

MBHO's  MBNM 410


http://www.mbho.de/products02_02a.htm