Which measurement microphone is best so that you can run
Smaart, SATLive, RiTA, SysTune, whatever you want to run and get great results?
The truth is it doesn't matter. In this video i'm going to show you why. So does
it matter which microphone you use? At this point not really, especially if
you're just getting started is a 1000 or 2000 or $3000 microphone gonna make you
happy and get you better results probably not the only real advantage of
having one of those really expensive microphones is that they will give you
consistent results from day to day and changing ambient conditions so if it's
cold in the morning and hot in the afternoon or the humidity changes those
expensive microphones are really great at just giving you consistent results
but in our case especially if we're measuring inside and we're just going to
set up a sound system and it's going to take 30 minutes what we care about is
whether or not this bicycle here in this seat also measures the same as this
bicycle here in this seat if this picture is the same as this one we care
about trends okay so we don't really care about flat and I have news for you
guys out in the field your measurements are gonna look like this oh god it's
terrifying it's scary it's gross okay in this and oh god it's so ugly and
difficult to look at and gross this is what a real measurement in the field
looks like okay so we kind of stopped carrying about flat so much and we start
looking at trends what is happening in each of these measurement microphone
positions that I can really take action about so the only real requirement that
we have with these measurement microphones is that they be
omnidirectional and I'm gonna put omnidirectional in quotes here because
I'm about to break that rule but an omnidirectional microphone better
represents our ears right if you take a directional microphone and move it
closer or farther away from a source it's gonna change its response proximity
effect you guys know about this stuff so we've got a cheap option but some of
you guys are saying Nathan you said you were going to build a free DIY audio
analyzer guess what you can basically use any microphone you have around the
house so can use an sm57 sure you can if you don't want to drop $50 on a
Behringer ECM 8000 right now you can use basically any microphone so this is a
microphone that my friend Travis and I bought 20 years ago for $70 so at this
point it's probably worth noting send them in a value it's worth a lot of
money but you could find this kind of microphone in a trash can
it's a Audio Technica in be 3000 l it sounds terrible but
you can use it to do measurements okay because again what I care about is if I
take a measurement here in a measurement here how do they compare what's the
trend what do they look like so let's actually compare this
microphone to another microphone here's the comparison here's your $0.00
microphone in green compared to a $350 microphone in yellow so what do we see
here first of all they're not super dissimilar especially through the
mid-range up here we've got some pretty big differences just around this area
and you know in the low end we probably shouldn't use this microphone to measure
subs if we want to measure things around 40 Hertz and those of you who are very
clever already noticed that we have a polarity inversion here but guess what
it doesn't matter if we're doing measurements with a single microphone
and we're gonna say okay I'm gonna put this measurement microphone here I'm
gonna measure this speaker then this speaker then this speaker then this
speaker absolute phase doesn't matter all it matters is that when we measure
the phase they all match okay and then we can say all our speakers have
matching polarity what I want to do in the next video is I'm going to show you
how you can take this zero dollar trashcan microphone and turn it into a
$350 or $1000 microphone okay because we can introduce a microphone correction
curve and make these two traces that right now look different look exactly
the same okay so I'm going to do that in the next video and just speaking of
correction curves I want to show you something real quick a lot of my
students like this microphone the Dayton audio emm six it looks exactly the same
cost the same as your classic behringer ECM 8000 the only real difference is
that it comes with a microphone correction curve and in the next video
I'm going to teach you how to use that so you've got your free and your cheap
options now and so you should be ready to go in terms of microphones
sound design