Hi Johnathan,
I think you can take from grickerd's testimonial that the em172 works just fine
with the M10, and will not overload the M10's preamps even with things as loud
as nearby trains.
You can tell from our contrasting opinions, too noisy v.s. extremely quiet,
that such a quality is subjective to a recordist's objective. What kinds of
nature recordings do you want to make?
One reason I feel the M10 is too noisy for a lot of stuff is in the past I used
a Sony Hi-MD recorder along with a phantom power supply and NT1-A microphones,
and was able to get some pretty good recordings from pretty quiet locations.
Trying the same approach using the M10, I have found it to add significantly
more hiss and at lower frequencies where they interfere with the prime
material, thus harder to edit it out. On Raimund's chart there is only 2dB
difference, but I think on the very margin of what is acceptable every dB
counts towards making or breaking a clean sounding recording. Of course, it
may be that in between those using two rigs I upgraded from a Marantz PMD670 to
a SD702 as my main recorder, and doing that raised my standards significantly
regarding preamp noise. Even if difference between the NT1A/SD702 and the
EM172/M10 as far as noise performance in quite environments is noticeably
extreme, I have made many great recordings with both.
For the little it is worth, in a brief test yesterday I found that using a
single-capsule em172 stereo pair with the M10 set at full gain (Hi-10), it was
a bit too much for recording a stream riffle about 10 meters away or my own
normal voice at less than 1 meter. Switching the recording level to either
Hi-5 or Lo-10 brought the peaks down to around -12dB.
John Hartog
http://oregonsoundscapes.com/ http://oregonsoundscapes.com/
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