Microphone shootout
Following a paper for the 134th AES convention in Rome, 4-7 May 2013, I am putting some extra data online. For a thorough explanation, please refer to the paper. The experiment conducted for this paper involved a recording of a single source (a female singer) by eight different microphones, thus obtaining eight different audio files per recording.
This post merely supports the paper and provides some interesting audio and video for microphone enthusiasts. This is by no means a rigorous comparison of this selection of microphones for various reasons. Please get back to me via the comments or Contact section, and enjoy reading the paper.
Please note that due to a wrong position of the Sennheiser MD421-II (facing sideways), its data is irrelevant.
The preamp settings (Focusrite ISA 428 MkII) were as follows, to obtain roughly equal levels at the converter stage (SSL Alphalink MADI AX):
The singer in front of the microphone array:
The microphone array from another perspective:
Audio and video (per fragment; each fragment is shown eight times with audio from one of eight different microphones):
Watch in HD for high quality audio!