thecongo;
That is almost exactly the reason I purchased a matched pair of SP B1's. I already had a MXL V67 which is about perfect for about 75% of the vocals I do but I wasn't satisfied with it as an instrument mic (Guitar, drum overhead....) & I also wanted another LD condenser with a slightly different flavor (a little less sibilance range hype) for some things & a slightly more extended freq range at both ends & being on a budget it seemed that from what specs I saw that the B1 should work nice to fill my need for a better instrument/drum overhead mic & alternative sounding vocal mic so I took a chance on a pair & so far am quite satisfied. I just did a test run a couple of nights ago with them as overheads & they sounded quite nice. Maybe not as good as a pair of MXL603s's but certainly better I thought than the V67. I was a little worried that being large diaphragms that their freq response wouldn't remain good over a wide enough pattern & this may be an advantage to something like the MXL603's but they seemed to do fine. I did a low tech analysis of their polar response by playing some pink noise through one of my speakers & recording it with the B1, holding the mic directly in front of the speaker & slowly spinning it. Viewing the spectrum analyzer in Samplitude of the recorded wave while it's playing, the freq response stays constant from on axis to about 45 degree off axis, at which point you can just begin to see the response above 10khz start to drop off just a little. From 45 degrees off axis to 90 degree off axis there's a rather rapid and continual degradation of freq response (mostly high freq loss) & some overall volume loss, both of which continue to degrade till they are at there minimum at approximately 135 degree off axis. Anyway without much further rambling, the main thing is that a constant response of +- 45 degree off axis should be fine for a pair of drum overheads if you keep that in mind when positioning & aiming them. The B1's vocal response was also about what I expected. Perhaps could use just a tad more sheen (They have a little dip in response around the 5 khz range), but anything I want out of it seems only a minor EQ adjustment away. The big + is it's clean & not harsh sounding (something you can't say about all the low priced Chinese based condensers) which makes me suspect the built in pre for the transformerless coupling is fairly decent.
From what little I know of the MXL2003 (V93) it also seems to me that it would work well in this multipurpose role.
That's all I know about that.
-Stephen-
