[LAU] OT: Which crappy mic should I use?

[Ken Restivo]

On Sat, Mar 20, 2010 at 10:04:48AM +0100, Arnold Krille wrote:
> On Friday 19 March 2010 23:10:11 Ken Restivo wrote:
> > It's going to come down to convenience, I think. I prefer dealing1 with my
> >  M-Audio FastTrack with its nice XLR and TRS connectors and ability to turn
> >  off hardware monitoring, than dealing with the Zoom with its always-on
> >  hardware monitoring and dinky 1/8" jacks. So I'll probably end up using
> >  the PG58 for everything except background vocals where we'll have 3 or 4
> >  of us standing around the Zoom in a 120-degree pattern.
> 
> Why not use the zoom as a microphone and record it with the fasttrack?
> If you can't turn off the hw-monitoring on the zoom, make it a feature. Connect 
> the outputs of the zoom to the inputs of the fasttrack. Then you get the mics 
> and pre-amps of the zoom and the convenience of the fasttrack. And if you 
> press the record-button of the zoom, you get a backup recording as a bonus.
> 

Great idea! Unfortunately, I haven't checked email until today, and the vocals are done now. I used the PG58. It was good enough for what we're doing; vocals are not the focus of the music by any means.

> 
> 
> PS: I would love to say I couldn't differentiate between the pg58 and my little 
> studio-projects condenser-mics. But even the difference between the pg and an 
> sm is obvious when you have both on stage through a pa...

Not to me. I'm not an audio engineer, I have tinnitus, and my ears are shot from 25 years of playing music.

The only difference I can definitely hear is between any dynamic mic and a large-diaphragm condenser like the MXL 990 which I owned briefly a few years ago. But I can't tell the difference between that MXL into a FastTrack and, say, my friend's Neumann through a tube preamp.

-ken