Anyone do that Warm Audio Mystery Box sale?

[DrewPeterson7]

Snagged one as an impulse buy, that just shipped today. Basically, for $250, they'll send you one of their mics, which most likely will be one of their $299 Jr series mics (which are still fairly well regarded, as good-for-the-money takes on classic mic designs), but there's an outside chance it'll be one or a matched pair of one of their more expensive mics (with the most expensive eligible mic being their WA-8000 at $1300), and one buyer will receive a full 13 mic collection of every eligible mic they're including in the mystery box offer.

I'm pretty well set for the instruments I usually record (acoustic and electric guitar, mostly - bass I go direct, and I sequence drums), but it never hurts to have a few more usable mics lying around, so I impulse ordered one. Worst case, I spent $250 on a mic probably worth around that, and it'll be one option to pull out every now and then. Best case, I spent $250 on something a fair bit nicer, and maybe it'll be a viable alternative to one of my usual go-to's.

Kind of a fun offer, anyway. As far as the "knockoffs of top dollar classic gear" go, Warm Audio is fairly well regarded, so whatever I get, well, I only hope it's not their take on an AKG C414, since I've already got a pair of SE Electroncs SE4400a's, which is their (excellent) take on that design.

 

[Serendipity Records]

I know they’re sold off of Reverb but I cannot seem to find an actual link for the sale?

 

[TalismanRich]

I saw that a few days ago, but I really don't have a need for another mic. Some people have bought mics, and immediately posted them for sale on Reverb. If they were lucky enough to get an expensive mic, they price it a hundred less than retail. I guess it's an easy way to make some extra spending money.

The promotion appears to be over. You can expect the market to be flooded with "Used - MINT WA-47jr" mics.

I saw several FenTone Ribbons and an 87R2 listed already.

 

[DrewPeterson7]

It looks like the promotion IS, indeed, over. But, as Rich pointed out, the sale of mics people didn't actually want should just be getting started, the secondary market should be cheap for a while.

Busy week and I dind't know it had already drawn to an end, otherwise I'd have posted before now. A buddy texted me a link while I was apple picking with my wife and daughter, and I basically gave it one look, decided $250 was "F it!" money for a mic, and ordered one. Even a Jr series will probably occasionally get some use.

 

[DrewPeterson7]

So, good news, bad news.

The good news - I got my mystery box today, and it was NOT a Jr. series mic. Rather, it was a WA-14, their take on an AKG C-414, which is an excellent mic for a lot of things, but not the least of which acoustic guitars, which I record a fair amount of.

The bad news - it's such an obvious pick for acoustics, in fact, that I already own a matched pair of SE Electronics SE4400a's, a C-414 clone, so this was the one mic in the giveaway that, while I didn't really need any of them, I REALLY didn't need this one.

Still, I got a $400 mic for $250, and it really IS a nice sounding mic - this is just a few moments of farting around on a quickly positioned mic facing towards the neck joint fret on my Martin, maybe a foot back, into a CAPI V28 and with no other processing save for a volume boost into a light limiter (that only touched a few of the very peaks) just to get this up to a "sharable" volume.

A bit sloppy, but this was a couple minutes between calls:

(also, especially listening back on my laptop now, there's some noise in here, and that was a combo of me shifting position before the first chord and my headphone cable hitting my arm a few times while playing, the actual self-noise of the mic felt pretty normal to me, even into a fairly hot preamp)

Probably not the right position for the faster flatpicking bits, but the softly strummed chords at the end, in particular, I think sound great.

Now to try to decide if there's any actual reason for me to NEED three C-414 style mics, or if I should just give this one to my dad.

 

[TalismanRich]

Before you give it to your dad, or post it on Reverb or Craigslist, it might be nice to do a good comparison of the SE to the WA. For someone looking for a 414 style mic, they could decide if it was worth the extra $100 to get the SE or worth saving $100 to go with the Warm.

I think that type of info can be invaluable, especially if a WA14 pops up on the Used-Mint marketplace for $350 or less.

 

[DrewPeterson7]

Before you give it to your dad, or post it on Reverb or Craigslist, it might be nice to do a good comparison of the SE to the WA. For someone looking for a 414 style mic, they could decide if it was worth the extra $100 to get the SE or worth saving $100 to go with the Warm.

I think that type of info can be invaluable, especially if a WA14 pops up on the Used-Mint marketplace for $350 or less.

Yeah, you're absolutely right - it's really hard to do a good apples-to-apples comparison of something as position-sensitive as a cardioid condenser mic, but I suppose the best way to go at it would be to put them capsule to capsule, one upside down and the other right side up, and record the same performance into one... My wife is on call this weekend so maybe I can do something during my daughter's nap time. Then, video it and post it on Youtube, I guess, since that's the social media platform I have easily the largest reach on.

If you were looking at something like this, would some strummy chords, isolated and then maybe over bass and drums and identical double tracked performances, be enough? Or what would you want to hear? I'm not a good fingerstyle player so it would mostly be whether you'd find chords or single note stuff the most useful, and if you;d want it solo'd, double-tracked (I prefer double-tracking strummed acoustic parts to stereo micing, when I want "space"), or in a mix...

 

[TalismanRich]

I think some basic acoustic strumming, and picking is a good start. Piano is also a good one as it has a wider frequency range.

When I get a new mic, I'll set up one of my current mics (usually the NT1 for LDC or AKG P170 for SDC) and the new mic and do a bit of guitar and some vocals. I also will shake a tambourine to hear how the top end varies. It's amazing how much a simple tambourine can reveal. I also try to set the preamp to give essentially equal recording levels, and then get silence to gauge self noise. A phone with a 1kHz tone is great for setting level.

I really should set up a white or pink noise track that I can play. Then I could compare my "ear" evaluation to a spectral plot. But I haven't bought a new mic in a few years, so there hasn't been a need.

 

[DrewPeterson7]

I don't have access to a piano, alas... but I'll see what I can do.

I'd hope that the two mics are consistent enough that they should be at least very close to equal volume, but I'll volume match in my DAW before doing anything with them.

Normally I do singlecoil pickup comparisons, so I'll go at it sort of how I'd approach that...

 

[TalismanRich]

A clean sound that is reasonably well known (like a strat into a deluxe reverb) could be useful, but I can change the sound with a few turns of the knobs. It's hard to say if the mic conveys what the original sound is like.

I've seen comparisons where they basically just dial up a metal guitar sound. I just pass them by. Massive distortion can mask so much, and then just picking which one you "like" is meaningless. If your amp is massively shrill and you put a mic on it with no top end, it might make it sound ok in that particular application, but for 99% of the other uses, it would be meaningless.

That's one reason I like using acoustic instruments, but even those can vary.

 

[DrewPeterson7]

A clean sound that is reasonably well known (like a strat into a deluxe reverb) could be useful, but I can change the sound with a few turns of the knobs. It's hard to say if the mic conveys what the original sound is like.

I've seen comparisons where they basically just dial up a metal guitar sound. I just pass them by. Massive distortion can mask so much, and then just picking which one you "like" is meaningless. If your amp is massively shrill and you put a mic on it with no top end, it might make it sound ok in that particular application, but for 99% of the other uses, it would be meaningless.

That's one reason I like using acoustic instruments, but even those can vary.

We're speaking about pickup comparisons now right? And not C414 comparisons?

I always try to do both clean and distorted, and I do them same guitar and same amp settings. As far as gain, I hear your concern... but I favor a pretty touch-sensitive amount of saturation anyway which may make it a little more transparent than most, and beyond that, there ARE clear differences you can hear in how pickups handle saturation, and that definitely impacts my own preferences. But, if you aren't interested in gain, I think you pretty much have to include SOME clean playing, with the very rare possible exception of a pickup that's wound from the ground up to be a metal rhythm guitar pickup (and I tend not to like those!)

As far as mics, I haven't dne anything yet, but was talking with a buddy this morning about mic choice on acoustics, and my current two favoerite mics are a SE4400 (C414 style) and VR1 ribbon (both from SE Electronics). So I recorded two quick clips for him, VR1 in position but a hair lower than I might normally set it, and the SE4400 upside down above it with the tops ALMOST touching, and ran both through two matching preamps and recorded the same performance with both at the same time. That's how I plan on tackling a SE4400 and WA14 comparison. It's not exact since the capsules won't be in exactly the same position... but it should be as fair as humanly possible.

 

[TalismanRich]

I really don't check out pickup comparisons. They vary SO much. I was referring to people that do a mic evaluation by sticking them in front of a Marshall with an SD1 pedal turned full blast. Then you're supposed to discern a mic's characteristics from that.

BTW, I hear people talking all the time about their pickups getting "growl" or drive. They "dig in" and the pickups get crunchy! I have a dozen guitars, and NONE of the pickups get any kind of growl or crunch. Put any of those guitars into an amp that is clean and has adequate headroom and they ALL come through clean. For me, 100% of the gain comes from the amp. Sure if you put a Dimarzio Super Distortion pickup into a Marshall and turn up the preamp, it will have more gain than using a low wound strat pickup. If one pickup puts out 800mv and another puts out 40mV for an equal amount of strumming, there's going to be a completely different signal hitting the front of the amp.

It's like comparing an SM7B at 1.1mv/Pa vs a Sennheiser MK4 at 21mV. We guitarists use Klons and other signal boosters so that we can overdrive the input of the amp, just as people use a Cloudlifter after an SM7B or a ribbon mic. With mics, most of the time we aren't trying to introduce 50% distortion. With guitars we like that 50% distortion.

Something that it different with microphones is that you can do a standardized test for output. Play a 1kHz tone at 1 Pascal of pressure (~94dB) and measure the electrical output. With guitars, there's no standardized method of measuring the input signal, hence there's no standardized output measurement. It would be nice if there was a device that you put over the poles of a pickup that induced a set amount of magnetic vibration to simulate a string's vibration.

Measuring DC resistance is very crude comparison and doesn't take into account the difference in magnets, nor the number of turns and the gauge of wire. I can wind fewer turns of a thinner wire and get the exact same resistance as a more turns of a thicker wire. 200Ft of 39 gauge wire is 166 Ohms. 159ft of 40 gauge wire is also 166 Ohms. They wouldn't put out the same voltage in an electromagnet.

In any case, I look forward to your comparisons.

 

[DrewPeterson7]

Suffice to say, I have a LOT of thoughts here, haha. Certaoinly, starting with I've never heard anyne describe a pickup as "having crunch," and as for growl, I would interpret that as maybe referring to the way the midrange, probably low mids, interacts with the front end of a distorted preamp - growl to me would be low-mid, while I might describe a pickup that pushed the high mids into distortion a little faster as having "snarl" to it, if it was also accompanied by some aggressive high end - a JB might be a good example here, as I think that thing sounds like a chainsaw when you hit the front end of a "crunchy" amp with it. Something like a Blaze seven string bridge pickup though, has a lot more low mid energy to it, and that's one I might describe as having some growl to it hitting a distorted amp. Obviously, in a crystal clean amp, you're not going to hear any of that, because the preamp is interacting with the pickup in a very different way.

But, that kind of gets to why I do think distortion can be useful when auditioning pickups - part of what makes a certain pickup very good for some things and maybe less so for others is how it interacts with the front end of an amp. I tend to not like very high output pickups, because generally speaking, I've found hotter pickups usually trade breadth and evenness for a LOT of output but in a comparitively narrow range. This, paradoxically, helps them sty a little more articulate when you throw a ton of preamp gain at them - Dimarzio's DActivator is a good example, I think. I hated that pickup, because it was very bright and relatively thin, though super hot. At the kind of gain ranges I like, it sounded thin and brittle despite being extremely high output; get upt o, say, technical death metal gain, and that brittle thinness became clarity and articulation. A PAF style pickup, meanwhile, would sound huge in the gain ranges I like... but would be a muddy, indistinct mess at that kind of gain range.

Idunno, if electric instruments aren't your thing and you don't really spend much time "feeling" how the front end of a distorted amp response, this is probably going to sound like greek to you. But there ARE pretty big differences here, and they matter.

Comparison incoming, I'll start a seperate thread to keep the discussions seperate.

 

[TalismanRich]

Oh, I play a lot of electric. I've got a Marshall DSL, a hand wired 65 Princeton Reverb, a Classic 30, a Heritage Patriot and a 1953 National Supreme (Valco). They all sound completely different. The 45W Patriot has massive headroom. By the time I got any distortion out of it, the amp is way WAY too loud. The National distorts really easily. The DSL and Classic 30 both have master volumes, so you can get them to distort at conversation levels. The distortion is coming from the preamp, not the power tubes.

And I think you actually agreed with what I said. It's the amp that actually delivers the distortion, not the pickup. Any amp that is driven beyond it's peak will distort, whether it's the preamp stage or the power amp stage, or even a pedal. And yes, when auditioning pickups, the voicing will definitely need to be considered in an overdrive situation.

I way trying to say that judging a microphone by listening to a heavily distorted guitar amp is pointless to me. It's hard to know what the original sound is supposed to be . When I was playing in August with the Princeton fed by Seth Lovers, I got a really nice creamy "woman tone" using just a Waza Blues Driver pedal. I could adjust the pedal and make it more crunchy. Had I done a mic comparison with that sound, I would have had trouble saying what the character of the mic was.

However, hearing your Martin, I could distinctly hear differences between the mics. I have a pretty good idea what a Martin, Taylor or Gibson acoustic sounds like. For me, the SE sound more what I expect a Martin to sound like. The Warm sounded thinner, very crisp, less body or bloom.

 

[DrewPeterson7]

And I think you actually agreed with what I said. It's the amp that actually delivers the distortion, not the pickup. Any amp that is driven beyond it's peak will distort, whether it's the preamp stage or the power amp stage, or even a pedal. And yes, when auditioning pickups, the voicing will definitely need to be considered in an overdrive situation.

Ah ok, so we're in pretty close agreement, then - I think pickup comparisons into a distorted amp are still useful simply because where a pickup is focused can change where an amp distorts, and I guess I just confused some of what you were saying on mic comparisons on a distorted signal, on pickup comparisons.

Which, I guess, if you were to do a mic comparison using a distorted amp as a source... Just posting a clip of "here's a MD421 on my guitar amp!" really doesn't help because there are too many other variables. I guess you'd have to go about it the same way I try to with pickup comparisons - compare a few mics on the same amp and settings, if possible the same performance and reamp it through various mics, and keep the position as close to identical as possible from one to the next (though this is a huge challenge, lol). A clip of one mic on its own is pretty useless... but a clip of a SM57, and four other alternative mics, on the same amp with the same settings and very similar if not identical peformances, you DO start to get some of the nuance of how one mic compares to another that way.

Just going about it scientifically, I guess - control as many variables as you can.

(and yeah, I agree - the WA-14 s actually really nice, and the high end in particular has some... sort of funkiness to it that I think is really appealing... but I think the signal I was getting out of the SE4400a was fuller, and a very slight treble boost and even slighter 360hz cut with a Neve-style EQ on the SE segnal and I was able to get them very close, but in ways where I liked the EQ'd one a hair more. Still, if I was recording guitars and a WA-14 was the only decent LDC I had at my disposal... I'd have zero hesitation using it.)_