microphone science fair project

A

an1989dy

New member
I am doing a science fair project on how the quality of a microphone effects the recording of a guitar track. I am going to use a cheap radio shack mic, a shure sm-57, and a condenser mic and record to my boss br-1180 or my pc onto cakewalk. the only problem is, i need a way to compare the results of the different tracks. is there a way to compare the frequencies of the recorded tracks, or like an audio analyizer? any help would be great. thanks! :) :confused:
 
an1989dy said:
I am doing a science fair project on how the quality of a microphone effects the recording of a guitar track. I am going to use a cheap radio shack mic, a shure sm-57, and a condenser mic and record to my boss br-1180 or my pc onto cakewalk. the only problem is, i need a way to compare the results of the different tracks. is there a way to compare the frequencies of the recorded tracks, or like an audio analyizer? any help would be great. thanks! :) :confused:
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There are free audio spectrum programs on the Internet, but how will that help you with your project? True, it will tell you how the different frequencies are varying in level, but it isn't an indicator of "quality".

Kinda like doing a test on the "quality" of water, by measuring the speed it comes out of the faucet.
 
Harvey Gerst said:
There are free audio spectrum programs on the Internet, but how will that help you with your project? True, it will tell you how the different frequencies are varying in level, but it isn't an indicator of "quality".

Kinda like doing a test on the "quality" of water, by measuring the speed it comes out of the faucet.
Click to expand...


Yeah, but the teachers in the science fair won't know that! He can make up some kind of a story about how such and such frequencies relate to the spectrum of human hearing, and the frequencies in mic A exhibit such and such frequencies, mic B exhibits blahblahblah, proximity effect, mic placement, diaghram size, etc...he'll probably get a "A". At the very least he'll get more personal experience with microphones!

Terry
 
Hmmm. Well, you could analyze the direct spectrum and compare, but that conveniently ignores the effect of cabinet and speaker. Or you could try a reference mic and compare the others against it, that might be a little more 'scientific'. Calculate the difference between the reference mic and the others, and compare with their published frequency curves. Then add some qualitative descriptions, and explain how those relate to the hard data.
 
oh make a mic with a speaker... shouldnt take more then 5 mins, just for some bonus marks. i couldnt believe how stupid everyone was in my physics 12 class was last year, even the teacher, when they realized a microphone is essentially a speaker in reverse. i guess just for back ground to what a microphone is if youre going to get into that. good luck
 
You know how they measure to see if microphones are matched? They play the same set of tones to each of them then phase shift one result and combine them. For a perfectly matches pair the result would be silence.

You could do the same thing with Cakewalk. Create a series of tones ascending the whole audible scale. Add some clicks at the start for alignment. mixdown and maximize.

Then play this track while recording it on each of the microphones, being sure to keep mic position constant. Maximize. Then bring them together. Use the clicks to get as close to a sample-to-sample alignment as possible (this may be the tough part). Phase shift one against the other and combine. The quietest result would theoretically be the mic that was the most overall accurate. Yes all the coloration of the speaker is thrown in, but that would be a constant for each test.
 
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