Fascinating... mic comparison: audio test kitchen

Just found out about this mic comparison website...
Interesting to see how they made it possible to compare the large amount of different mics from only one perfomance. They also recorded DIY mics btw.



I find this straightforward.. to directly get a feeling of how different microphones compare to each other without variation in mic position, signal chain, level, or source... just made some very interesting discoveries the last minutes  ;D ;D

Check it out: https://app.audiotestkitchen.com
(registration needed to compare all 300 mics and use sessions)

Nice, thanks from bringing this out it seems quite interesting

While it's remarkable accomplishment there is an issue with audio examples. If you try to do a null test between almost any two mics with complete song examples, you will see that tracks within songs are misaligned by few samples.

So if drums, guitars, bass cancel out perfectly, vocal might not cancel out at all. So i wouldn't use whole song examples as a reference for anything. This is probably due to physical misalignment between mics. But it could be anything really. 

kingkorg said:

While it's remarkable accomplishment there is an issue with audio examples. If you try to do a null test between almost any two mics with complete song examples, you will see that tracks within songs are misaligned by few samples.

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Well, I cannot imagine one second these recordings have been made simultaneously. Even if they were, they could not be in the same position, so there's bound to be differences of arrival time. One sample at 48kHz is 7mm (1/4").
Neither can I musicians and singers repeating the same performance 300 times!
So I'm really questioning the test method here.
If I was slanderous, I would think there's only a single performance of each tune, via a microphone modelling system. But I'm a malignant bastard.
This would not be inconsistent with the variable time alignment, since different convolution filters can generate different propagation times.
This would also be consistent with Townsend being a sponsor.

Iirc, they play the tracks through a monitor speaker, and got some fancy laser rangefinder setup for repeatably placing the mics.

https://youtu.be/Kb-yXHPtdPU

(Not 10000% sure this is the video I had in mind, but judging by the duration, it may well be.)

Khron said:

Iirc, they play the tracks through a monitor speaker, and got some fancy laser rangefinder setup for repeatably placing the mics.

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OK. So we're listening to a mic into a speaker into a mic...
The time difference may be explained by the difficulty in assessing the real acoustic apex of the mics.

(Not 10000% sure this is the video I had in mind, but judging by the duration, it may well be.)

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Definitely no. Nothing technical in it.

My apologies then, it's this one: https://youtu.be/cAc8teTdqHU

Khron said:

My apologies then, it's this one: https://youtu.be/cAc8teTdqHU

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yes, this one is interesting, it shows the guy knows his stuff.
However, in use, I'm not really convinced.
I douldn't detect any significant difference between the mics I had selected. I would have thought to hear significant differences between the AT4060 and the SM7b, that are my go-to vocal mics.

abbey road d enfer said:

But I'm a malignant bastard.

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..and that's what we like about you..! Don't take BS for face value..  ;D