How do I take this cheap microphone that I bought 20
years ago that at this point is probably worth $0 and turn it into a $350 fancy
measurement microphone? Or for that matter, how do I take any microphone that
I have laying around the house and turn it into a fancy $1,000
measurement microphone? Whatever you want to do it's totally possible. I'm going to
show you how to do that today with microphone correction curves so I'm
gonna put this back on the microphone stands here and show you how it works
you you
all right so I know we're still in the shopping and building of our audio
analyzer phase of this video series so I'm not going to go through all the
steps of how to take a measurement and how to do the difference of curves
calculator and how to set up microphone correction curves I just want to do this
demo for you to prove to you that you don't need a really fancy microphone to
get started okay so I'm going to turn on the signal
generator and we're going to see two different measurements and orange here
we're going to see my zero dollar 20 year old microphone the audio technica
MB 3000 L and in red here we're going to see the eye semcon emx 70 150 and again
this is not really the way you want to set this up I have this set up to look
good for video so you can see I have a speaker here and two microphones and
they're gonna make a comparison in the future I'll do another video where
actually go step by step through this entire process because you want to be
away from any reflections that could influence the measurement you want the
microphones to actually be a little bit closer signal-to-noise ratio or things
like that this is just the demo so just keep that in mind I will put a link to
the calculators that I use in this demo though below this video so that you can
try it out for yourself if you want so let's take a live measurement and see
what these would look like before any microphone correction curves
all right here's the live measurement pretty different right
down here in the bottom I mean there's these lines here every 6 DB right so we
can see a lot of detail here down here in the bottom we're 12 DB off now we can
do is insert a microphone correction curve so that it gets the same data but
then the microphone correction curve says hey you know what don't put in
minus 12 don't show minus 12 shows zero show
whatever this is showing show the difference here and so I'm going to turn
the measurement back on and put the microphone correction curve in so you
can see what I'm talking about
look at that pretty cool right that's almost the exact same data no and it
would probably be even better if I was doing this under the right circumstances
and not talking and things like that now how did I do this pretty easy process
I'll just take you through it real quick so I would say both of these traces I
would copy them both to ASCII I would put them into this calculator over here
that I again I'll put a link to under this video from me fail me
Craig Schreiber that's going to create the microphone correction curve for me
that I'm just going to export as a text documents as simple as that and then
import microphone correction curve back into my
audio analyzer and then put on the correct input
so as I mentioned in a future video I'll take you step-by-step through this
process in smart and sat live but for now I just wanted to give you a demo
here to show you that you don't need an expensive microphone you can get started
for free right now whatever microphone you have around the house and it flat
doesn't really matter but if you want to go ahead and create your own microphone
correction curve maybe you can get a friend's mic or you can go to some
rental company nearby that has a more expensive mic ask them to let you use it
for a little bit and you can create your own microphone correction curve here so
you can start seeing more flat data or more data characteristic of a more
expensive microphone if you want to okay so this is pretty much the end of the
microphone shopping section of the videos and in the next video we're gonna
get into which audio interface is best so I'll see you there
sound design