rob aylestone
Moderator
I think if we are being honest - we place far to much emphasis on capture. Fair enough, when there was poorly performing kit on the market, capture could be impacted - but so many poor captures are because of incorrect mic placement and horrible sounding recording spaces - NOT - the gear. If you have a mic - lets say an SM58, and then you spend five times the price on something else, it will just sound a bit different. Maybe different better, or different worse, but how will you tell if your headphones change the sound the mics hear? Think about guitars. why do we use different amps and speaker cabs for bass guitar than 6 string guitar? Because they sound different. Studio monitors are not designed to flatter, they're designed to reveal. Headphones do the same. I'm ancient and I know that on certain headphones, I need to not push the bass because they have artificially loud bass, and if I get it wrong, my mixes sound either boomy or weak. My memory usually tells me to sort of mis-hear the bass. For somebody less secure in what they are really hearing it can be horrible to mix wrong, but right? As people have said, I don't think there are any terrible mics. Perhaps a good analogy would be that microphones are like only having one make and model of car available to buy. we are arguing about the colour, and how a red one is better than a brown one. Maybe we have two makes - Ford and Honda - each with just one model in different colours (and prices) this is our dynamic and condensers. We could put dirt cheap tyres on any of them, or really good performing ones - maybe this is like the monitor system. A wonderful car, in a gorgeous colour, running on remoulded, cheap rubber? Worse still, when we start talking about boutique audio products, this is a little like getting excited by very subtle shades in the colour choices.