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Research and shopping options for microphones -

Mic shopping can be a pretty daunting task, because they all sound different and getting your ears on a thorough audition isn’t an easy task unless your work takes you into many different studios. 

For the small to mid-level studio operator, I’d be of a strong mind that owning one or two top name mic’s is putting all your eggs in one basket, and for the same budget, a wider selection of mid-price microphones would serve much better. This is the approach that has given me the best results over the years.

If, on the other hand, you’re a one man shop and your specialty or pet project centers around one or two sound sources, a single, more upscale microphone might be just the ticket. For these situations, I have a recommendation that I find surprisingly absent from the copious quantities of Internet blog and trade magazine information.

If you’re shopping for the best mic for your voice, or your guitar, or your whatever, you have several choices. You can browse the catalogs, read the reviews, search out the blogs, talk to retail sales folks, and then finally do this: Make your best guess based on something you’ve never heard with your source or in your environment. Good luck.

If you’re in a metropolitan area you might be able to visit a large retail store, and have the sales person set up the microphone so you can talk into it while listening with headphones. Again, good luck. Headphone listening can be deceptive and the retail environment is not always very relaxed.

Slightly better would be to develop a good relationship with a retail sales person and earn yourself a liberal return privilege, where you buy two or three microphones and test them in your studio with the understanding that you’ll buy one and return everything else. One drawback to this approach is the fact that you’ll have to spend and possibly waste some money before you can establish enough credibility with the retailer to earn a liberal return privilege for buying and returning groups of mic’s. This approach would be more applicable if you’re interested in a broader education on microphone characteristics, and don’t mind laying out some cash for the cost of that education. The same principle applies to buying and selling a bunch of mic’s on eBay until you find just the right one. This can still get expensive and eat away at time better spent honing your studio chops or mowing the lawn.

The microphone shopping method I advocate is this: Book an hour or two in the most top tier studio you can afford. State your purpose -- you’re shopping for just the right mic for your source, and you’d like to book some time to have the house engineer help you select from among the mic’s they have on hand. It’s a small booking for the studio but it’s also a pretty easy “in-and-out” gig for the engineer, so many would be enthusiastic about it. 

Be sure the studio a variety of mic’s in your price range. If all their mic’s are too upscale, call a less top tier studio that still has a good selection. Go there and record your voice, or guitar, or drum, or whatever and take home a CD. Listen in your personal studio and see how the different mic’s compare when you put them through your own processing, EQ, compression and so forth. Listen to it again at a later date and see if your assessments hold up or change.

Let’s look at the advantages. The studio session will cost a few hundred bucks, but you’ll hear more mic’s in less time than in any other environment, using good monitors with good acoustics. You’ll have the help and recommendations of a highly experienced studio engineer. He’s not trying to sell you a particular brand, so he’ll be objective. He might have tips and tricks you haven’t considered. You might make a friend in the business. He could later become your industry contact for business networking and/or a good technical resource for other areas of studio work.