Are there really any truly dire microphones out there with a brand name on them? The AKG C1000 probably has the worst reputation of any mic, ever, but the reality is that it's a perfectly usable microphone, despite the rap sheet. I know I will never buy one after owning one for a short time and being a bit unimpressed - but was it a terrible mic? Like all the mics we talk about they either do one job really well, and others poorly, or they do everything above averagely, but not magically?
I get the impression that we judge mics on their flat EQ performance. Little bumps at 1K can be flattened if you don't like them, or re-created where they don't exist if you do.
The Line 6 radio mics I have can emulate (and Line 6 are very good at modelling) the sound of popular mics - Shures, Sennheiser, Audix etc, but they cannot emulate polar patterns. If you prefer Senn, you can sound like them, and reviewers think the results are accurate but it's just clever tone controls really, isn't it? So much of what we do is personal preference, not quality. With the range and scope of modern EQ, can we really not replicate the bumps and dimples in frequency response? With a treble and bass control with fixed slopes and frequency, we couldn't - but now we can have as many bands as we wish and each with variable Q.
When we compare X mic with Y mic - what are we really comparing?
If we had some pink noise at exactly the same distance from the mics, and EQ'd it flat for every mic - would they all sound the same? Is that Chinese condenser capable of being EQ'd to sound like the Neumann? We'd all say of course not, but what exactly are we hearing? Any mic is supposed to capture changes in pressure at a range of frequencies. If a mic does it linearly, like a measurement mic, we think it lacks character. I sometimes wonder if everything we do is just subjective, and we never really think about what is happening? We know a Neumann is nice, so is ANY mic with the same EQ response, automatically nice too?