797 Audio CR998 In Action

[Recording Engineer]

http://www.juston.com/public/resfrerec/Azure.mp3
It's over 8 megs, sorry.

Back in June or July (I can't really remember when), I did this live recording for my bass player's ex-band, Azure. This was an album release show (they FINALLY finished after 4 years or so) they did in a church and at the last minute, they asked me if I'd be willing to record it.

With next to no preparation at all, I quickly set-up a matched-pair of Neumann TLM103s on each side of the "stage", no more than roughly 20 feet apart (most likely less) and about 8 or 9 feet high. This was because most of the sound was coming off the "stage" and not much of anything was going through the PA (vocals and a tiny bit of drums and keys); and what was wasn't very loud at all.

Now the PA system was another issue. It was one of those great new "only one speaker in the middle of the church hanging from the ceiling" systems. So, I set-up a 797 Audio CR998 in figure-8 position probably no more than 40 feet back from the "stage" and about 8 or 9 feet high. I should have used cardioid (I knew this) but being that I know figure-8 is the hardest to get right in microphone manufacturing, I wanted to see how it did and sounded.

Each mic ran into its own Mackie 1604 VLZ PRO mixer channel and it's own Presonus ACP-8 compressor channel via the 1604's channel inserts. From there, the 3 channels were mixed to the main stereo outputs into an HHB 850 stand-alone CD recorder.

As I said, this was a last minute kind of "thing" and so I was forced to set levels and compressor settings (I didn't even bother with EQ) with about a half a songs length with just the bass, drums, and keyboard; no electric guitar or vocals. So what I'm trying to tell you is this recording was doomed from the beginning and balance of the instruments is EXTREMELY bad. In fact, the bass guitar is so DOMINATING through-out the entire song, it's hard to not strictly focus on it. Also, it's hard to make-out any of the words in the wash of the reverb; next to being too quiet. Funny things is, that's how it sounded actually be there, so I think I accurately captured it alright!

So why am I posting this? Well, people have been asking me what the 797 Audio CR998 sounds like and although I know you really can't get much of what it sounds like out of this recording, I thought you'd at least be able to hear the character of the extreme high-end "air" this microphone exhibits.

So, in this recording, most of the punch is coming from the TLM103s and the really high-end is coming from the CR998. Hope you enjoy!

In the hopefully semi-near future, the plan is to do a little microphone comparison of some mics. I've been wanting to do this for quite awhile now but things need to be right to make it worth-while for us all.

http://www.797audio.com/html/product1.htm
http://www.hhb.co.uk/FMPro?-db=HHB_C...DR850/MY&-FIND
http://www.mackie.com/Products/VLZ_P...1604VLZPRO.asp
http://www.neumann.com/mics/tlm103.htm
http://www.presonus.com/PreSonus__Pr...ive__acp8.html

[Recording Engineer]

Does the link even work for you? It doesn't me and I know the address is right. JustOn has always been a pain in the ass. Anyone know a lot more stable one?