The most expensive mic...

Blue Bottle mic is like $6,000. its a tube condenser and it is HUGEEEEE. comes with different caps for the mic, which can change the sound of it
 
Actually, I'm going to expound on my response. Certain microphones have become expensive because of the coveted sound and texture they, and only they, posses. If all microphones sounded the same those microphones and their beloved sound wouldn't have any value at all. They have a character that is elevated just above reality. None of them are technically perfect, but through history they have created our expectations of what recorded music should sound like and therefore set the bar.

Listen to any of your favorite old records and you realize that none of them sound like reality. I was just watching a great youtube video in where Dan Schwatrz comments about how if you listen to an old Beatles record it just sounds amazing, but none of it sounds like reality.

He makes a comment that really sums it up for me. "Why is a U47 a great vocal microphone?...It's NOT!...It SOUNDS like those old great recordings we fell in love with as kids!".

Only a U47 sounds like a U47, which is why they fetch upwards of $10,000 for a mint one. Likewise for all other expensive and cherished mics. The sound is the price tag.
 
Not the best analogy . . . or it is? There are Earthbound optics far superior to Hubble--indeed, since the launch of Hubble, the advent of adaptive computer-controlled optics has allowed ground-based observatories to start to rival Hubble. And of course, Hubble's optics were (in)famously flawed on manufacture, and required a Shuttle mission to mount "glasses" to fix them.

Hubble is unique for a single reason only: it's in the right place--space--above the atmosphere that refracts and obscures light. And so an $11K mic in the wrong place is a useless tool . . .
 
mshilarious said:
a useless tool . . .
Click to expand...

I keep thinking about what David Bock says in regards to how people with perfect engineering skills don't necessarily have any listening training. They can make something that is theoretically very correct, but really isn't very useful in the long run.
 
mshilarious said:
Not the best analogy . . . or it is? There are Earthbound optics far superior to Hubble--indeed, since the launch of Hubble, the advent of adaptive computer-controlled optics has allowed ground-based observatories to start to rival Hubble. And of course, Hubble's optics were (in)famously flawed on manufacture, and required a Shuttle mission to mount "glasses" to fix them.

Hubble is unique for a single reason only: it's in the right place--space--above the atmosphere that refracts and obscures light. And so an $11K mic in the wrong place is a useless tool . . .
Click to expand...

So how does your response relate to a bedroom/bathroom mirror and the effects of the atmosphere?

I can't really see how you can take half the analogy in one direction without making a similar comparison to the other half, Klaus. Perhaps you were just to preoccupied with the "sound of your own voice".
 
Well, OK, a discussion on optics, why not?

Fundamentally, an $11K tube mic and, say, an SM57 are the same thing: they transduce sound into an electrical signal. Your bathroom mirror and Hubble are fundamentally different: the bathroom mirror is flat, and Hubble is concave. A concave mirror gathers light across a wide aperture and focuses it on a single point. This enables it not only to make the very dim object brighter, it also allows resolution according to the size of the primary mirror. This is referred to as the "diffraction limit" of the mirror's resolution. There is no analogy with microphones, as the resolution of a microphone decreases with increasing diaphragm size. This is because a microphone diaphragm is a mechanical system and a telescope is not (ignoring the adaptive optics I mentioned), so increasing mirror size has no ill effect in terms of inertia (provided that you aren't the motor that is tasked with aiming the system).

You can read lots about diffraction-limited optics here:

Diffraction-limited system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For a large ground-based telescope, the diffraction limit far exceeds the resolution possible from having to look through the atmosphere, which refracts and thus diffuses light and makes it quite annoying to try to increase resolution. So there is no point in increasing the size of a ground-based telescope beyond a certain size (at least traditionally that was true, and the largest built is about 10m). This is also why telescopes are placed at high altitude, so they have less atmosphere to look through.

But Hubble, being in space, is able to operate at its diffraction limit, and so far outperforms larger ground-based telescopes. In fact, Hubble at 2.4m doesn't even make this list:

List of largest optical reflecting telescopes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And so we might ask, is it better to have an $11K mic in a bedroom, or a $1K mic in a properly designed acoustic space? Hubble would suggest the latter . . . of course if Hubble were comparatively as cheap, we would have 300 Hubbles and no ground-based scopes . . .
 
Never mind the rust and dust of existing in an atmosphere. Light diffraction and flat out blockage depending on the weather. An $11K mic in a hurricane is fairly equal to a $1 mic. Probably worse off as it might not have the same SPL tolerance. If you could shield it from the wind in an acoustically transparent fashion that is. Whistling power lines, creaking trees, wobbling signs, wind chimes, and tons of noises when the atmosphere gets that excited.

I tend towards a $1K option. I just don't think that there's enough difference on the average persons $10 clock radio that will play what was recorded. Unless you need a high SPL mic with almost zero noise floor, I just don't see the need to invest that heavily. Baring a lottery win.
 
The most expensive mics aren't the ones with the best technical specification, another area where astronomy differs from recording . . .
 
The most expensive? Would be a one of a kind, owned and used by some very famous.
Going to the highest bidder at action. ;)
 
Well in our modern HD world, we now have HD mics that spec past the 20Hz to 20kHz range typically thought of as human hearing. Scientific research on bat calls and other species that vocalize outside of a humans range. Plus other legitimate reasons to go above and beyond. Those tend to start at $1K and go up. Not that we have the equivalent of a $200K broadcast camera yet in a microphone. But there are a number of mic arrays that use multiple mics and can get quite costly when you look at the big pictures bottom line.

315 microphones to zoom in on anyone at a sporting event.
Squarehead Technology

Used at the world cup
SoundField: DSF-2 Digital Broadcast Microphone System

I wouldn't mind having one, but finding pricing info seems a bit of an effort in futility.
SoundField: SPS422B Microphone System

But then again, not singular microphones in the traditional sense.
 
A cheap mic is actually a very expensive mic, when you expect too much from it. The clock is always running, and when you use cheap gear and then have to do the whole thing over, cheap mics and cheap gear gets VERY expensive, fast.
 
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