Why are mics so expensive?

Hey, Harvey, I heard that Leo tried to recruit Les. What do you suppose would've happened to Gibson if the Paul was a Fender?
 
dgatwood said:
You don't see it, but it's not for the reasons you think. It's very hard to gold sputter a diaphragm in the thicknesses needed. Gefell uses a 0.1 micron thick layer of gold. I'm told that many cheaper capsules have 1 micron of gold or more. That's one big problem with cheap capsules, and is the reason that, for example, Peluso capsules are built in China, but sputtered elsewhere.

Second, while you can fab parts that are remarkably close to an existing part, the tolerances for an "exact" match are fantastically small, so cloning a part is exceedingly difficult---doubly so if you're trying to do it on the cheap---and if you're not trying to do it on the cheap, you're likely to want your capsule to have a bit of its own sound anyway rather than being a perfect clone of someone else's capsule.

Third, while you could build a machine to optimize the tension of mylar, AFAIK, it has never been done. It is conceptually very simple, but the precision involved (due to the small scale of the parts) would make the manufacturing equipment quite expensive to build if you want to get the same quality as a good capsule. The question then becomes whether it would be cost effective to use a machine. In the quantities that boutique mic manufacturers build, the answer is almost definitely no.

There is no technical reason why a human must be involved, though. Any measurement that can be performed by a human can be performed by a machine, and the notion of "intuition" is what we in computers refer to as "expert systems". Look into it before you go trying to BS me about what is and isn't possible.
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Then there is no reason that a computor can't come up with perfect recordings everytime. Mixing should be done also. Just put up the mics and let the computor set everything including mic placement, eq, compression etc. No reason a human should ever get involved.

Why is a great recording engineer great? Pro tools should eliminate talant completely.
 
MCI2424 said:
Then there is no reason that a computor can't come up with perfect recordings everytime. Mixing should be done also. Just put up the mics and let the computor set everything including mic placement, eq, compression etc. No reason a human should ever get involved.

Why is a great recording engineer great? Pro tools should eliminate talant completely.
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It could be done. Let's face it, mic placement isn't rocket science (and indeed, rocket science relies heavily on analytical tools), and it wouldn't take long to program an expert system. Stick a measurement mic a given distance from a source, compare to the desired sound, and the computer (already programmed with the studio's acoustics and mic locker) spits out the correct microphone and placement. The problem with existing packages like mic emulators or Har-Bal is probably that they are not involved early enough in the process.

However, once again you must consider economics. When you have access to kickass studios with talented engineers for $50 an hour, it would take a loooooooong time to recover the investment in mic-placement robots.

So there will always be a need for interns ;)
 
Just for fun, from their website:

"...The New Gefell M9 Capsule
Because PE (Mylar) is readily available, is easier to use, and can be fashioned in to a lighter membrane, it has become the material of choice for all metal-film microphone manufacturers. The lighter PE material provides a more responsive capsule, which results in greater sensitivity and articulation.

But manufacturing PE capsules is not without its challenges. As discussed above, due to the rolling procedure employed during manufacturing process, the molecular structure of PE becomes directional. This means that it has more resilience in the ‘roll’ direction. This prescribes that the capsule cannot be automatically tensioned to a given formula, but must be hand tensioned and ‘tuned’ like a drum skin for optimum performance. Hand tensioning by highly skilled employees is probably the single most important aspect that differentiates ‘the hand-crafted Gefell M9’ versus all others. .."
 
Some of the Brüel & Kjær lab mics I've used have all metal diaphragms, iirc.
 
MCI2424 said:
Then there is no reason that a computor can't come up with perfect recordings everytime. Mixing should be done also. Just put up the mics and let the computor set everything including mic placement, eq, compression etc. No reason a human should ever get involved.

Why is a great recording engineer great? Pro tools should eliminate talant completely.
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Nice try. A computer can't make qualitative judgments about what sounds good. A computer can make quantitative judgments---the tension of every point on this diaphragm is within 0.002% of the tension at the equivalent point on a diaphragm that was hand-tweaked by a human.

In much the same way, if I had no fader automation and was forced to hand-tweak the *%*&$ faders in my DAW every time I mixed down, I would immediately say that there must be a better way. A computer is perfectly capable of precisely reproducing the actions taken by the audio engineer. Same concept.
 
MCI2424 said:
"...The New Gefell M9 Capsule
Because PE (Mylar) is readily available, is easier to use, and can be fashioned in to a lighter membrane, it has become the material of choice for all metal-film microphone manufacturers. The lighter PE material provides a more responsive capsule, which results in greater sensitivity and articulation.

But manufacturing PE capsules is not without its challenges. As discussed above, due to the rolling procedure employed during manufacturing process, the molecular structure of PE becomes directional. This means that it has more resilience in the ‘roll’ direction. This prescribes that the capsule cannot be automatically tensioned to a given formula, but must be hand tensioned and ‘tuned’ like a drum skin for optimum performance. Hand tensioning by highly skilled employees is probably the single most important aspect that differentiates ‘the hand-crafted Gefell M9’ versus all others. .."
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Translation: we aren't smart enough to mark an arrow pointing in the direction that the roll came off the conveyor....

I'm just saying.... :D

There's nothing complicated about building an auto-tuner for drum heads, either. Thwack the heads at multiple points, take measurements, do an FFT on each sample to determine the fundamentals at each point on the head, do some math, adjust based on the math, repeat until tuned at the desired pitch. The difference is that nobody bothers building such a device for drums because the cost would be too high and nobody would buy it; few people tune a million drums a day.
 
dgatwood said:
Translation: we aren't smart enough to mark an arrow pointing in the direction that the roll came off the conveyor....

I'm just saying.... :D

There's nothing complicated about building an auto-tuner for drum heads, either. Thwack the heads at multiple points, take measurements, do an FFT on each sample to determine the fundamentals at each point on the head, do some math, adjust based on the math, repeat until tuned at the desired pitch. The difference is that nobody bothers building such a device for drums because the cost would be too high and nobody would buy it; few people tune a million drums a day.
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Hats off to you............... You got through this thread without:
1. Getting really snooty
2. Not degrading to hurling insults at other opinions.

Now, let's see you pull this off in some "other" forum.

Good Luck.
 
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