Mic, meet Mic

[SoundCard]

Just wanted to share a recent experience....

A few months ago I bought an Aston Origin mic and was a bit disappointed in the low level of signal I got from it. After testing various pre's, interfaces etc., I tested another exact same mic and there was a 3 dB increase with the alternate one. Don't get me wrong, I love this mic. The smoothness, clarity, .....just fantastic quality waveforms.
I just wanted to say that this simple problem caused all kinds of frustration and that the same thing could happen with other mics. A mic designer said that this can easily happen during assembly.

Just wanted others to know that this can happen, so check out a duplicate mic if you are having a problem with it. It could just be THAT mic. (I guess the same could be said for any equipment.)

~ray

ElevenWheelDrive.com

 

[keith.rogers]

Doesn't sound right to me. I'm no mic designer, but I can work a mV/Pa <-> dB calculator, and the specs for this mic list a sensitivity of 23.7mV/Pa, resulting in a db/Pa of -32.5dB (!). If I turn this around and input -35.5dB, the result is 16.8 mV/Pa - a difference of about 30%, which has to be outside any kind of manufacturing tolerance.

Maybe there's someone more knowledgeable, but I've never experienced that much audible signal difference in two new (same model) mics from a single manufacturer.

 

[John Willett]

Just wanted to share a recent experience....

A few months ago I bought an Aston Origin mic and was a bit disappointed in the low level of signal I got from it. After testing various pre's, interfaces etc., I tested another exact same mic and there was a 3 dB increase with the alternate one. Don't get me wrong, I love this mic. The smoothness, clarity, .....just fantastic quality waveforms.
I just wanted to say that this simple problem caused all kinds of frustration and that the same thing could happen with other mics. A mic designer said that this can easily happen during assembly.

Just wanted others to know that this can happen, so check out a duplicate mic if you are having a problem with it. It could just be THAT mic. (I guess the same could be said for any equipment.)

~ray

ElevenWheelDrive.com

This sort of things normally only happens with cheap mics.

I heard of a guy who had to test 50 Neumann TLM 103 mics purchased by a broadcaster - there was no more than 0.5dB difference between any of them, the were all virtually identical.