No doubt people who can afford 722's and Lunatecs will tend to hear
the improvement in quality they're dollars are paying for.Some will
recall that I defended the pre in my 744T over every challenger--
then I made and took some blind tests comparing it to the MP2 and
Walt, Dan and I concluded, that once the gear gets to a high level of
performance its pretty hard to discern. The recent tests I did
comparing the 722 and the lowly NH-900 HiMD's internal mic pre seems
to even question this conclusion.
The common belief is that "premiere," low noise, high gain, good
sound mic preamplification comes only at a cost either in a great
recorder or a great outboard pre. It was possible to maintain this
position because almost all of the lowly consumer grade recorders
used PIP-- preamps that offer the ease of "power in plug" for running
low voltage condenser capsules. Tests with PIP mics would show awful
performance, that I and many others, claimed was noise introduced by
the cheap, consumer grade preamp.
Klas Strandberg insisted for years that the chips used in the
consumer grade pres shouldn't be the source of this low performance--
that indeed they are high quality in themselves and that the the
noise and output performance of th mics _should_ be the limiting
factor. I guess the folks who bothered to try low noise mics, using
portable phantom power supplies on lowly consumer pres ran into the
same circuit conflicts I did initially-- the performance with the
phantom supplies I tried was nots ounding good,.. But guess what?
The Rolls PB224 and the Art Phantom II have not yet shown these
conflicts with the consumer pres I've tried this far.
What could this mean in terms getting low noise/high gain performance
from a pre? Take a listen to the most recent test I did (link below).
In the first segment, the "noise" you are hearing is, effectively,
95% noise just from the NT1A (I run maximum gain to show all the
warts and this mic has 5.5dBA self noise). In the next two segments,
the same mics are run through the phantom units and then directly
into the lowly mic pre input of the HiMD recorder.
http://www.uwm.edu/~type/Mic%20Preamps/PortPhantomHiMDReprtv01SorIMA.mov
Okay, there's a tiny, tiny bit more noise at full gain with the pre
in the $180 HiMD recorder, but note how similar it is between the two
different phantom units. I did some EQ and found that I could notch
out about 80% of the noise with fouror five, very skinny bands of
parametric EQ. Note also that the HiMD pre actually outperforms the
722's gain by 5dB!
Of course, there are still good reasons to buy and use expensive
gear, but can we accurately say its because of how shi**y the
consumer grade pres are (if one knows that one can get around the PIP
pre conflicts^ with a Rolls or Art unit)? There may be some
combinations of mics with these two phantom units and different
recorders that don't work as well, but even my manual gain video
camcorder's pre is sounding great! Rob D.
^ This is an assumption. I've not yet figured out the factors of why
the other phantom units did not work.
=3D =3D =3D =3D =3D
At 8:44 AM -0700 7/26/05, umashankar wrote:
>may be the analog circuits are a little simpler (not
>necessarily noisier ) but i have seen similar akm
>chips in my audio denmark a to d convertor and the
>m-audio transit which has all its electronics inside a
>small usb device. there is no need for the a to d
>convertors to be large.
>
>umashankar
>
>--- Michael Raphael <> wrote:
>
>> >At 15:08 2005-07-26, you wrote:
>> >>Has anyoen seen this:
>> >>
>>
>>>http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/MicroTrack-main.html
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>I probably wouldn't want to used the analog
>> inputs,
>> >
>> >
>> >why not??
>> >
>> >Klas
>> >
>>
>>
>> I could be wrong , but I would suspect that the
>> converters wouldn't
>> be so hot, nor would the mic pres. Compromises have
>> to made in
>> something that small.
>>
>>
>> "Microphones are not ears,
> > Loudspeakers are not birds,
>> A listening room is not nature."
>> Klas Strandberg
>> Yahoo! Groups Links
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
>____________________________________________________
>Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page
>http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
>
>
>
>"Microphones are not ears,
>Loudspeakers are not birds,
>A listening room is not nature."
>Klas Strandberg
>Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>
--
Rob Danielson
Film Department
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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