"Where does the tone come from in a microphone?"

[abbey road d enfer]

Thank you, MicMan, for bringing appeasement.

 

[cyrano]

Moi, j'aime bien le pinard. Maybe that carries over to my taste in microphones?

 

[klem]

...but why ridicule a man who's trying to show - and has put plenty of effort into it - a basic, and entertaining, grounding in mics? He's an 'enthusiast' and he doesn't profess to be an expert.

Eh MicMan, I think you know the answer, or at least you've seen it manifest on message boards including this one many many times - it's much easier to critique others than do something of similar effort yourself. Or to put it another way, negativity is too easy.

 

[abbey road d enfer]

As Ian wrote many times, only the ones that do nothing do nothing wrong.

 

[k brown]

Best thing about the vid - enthusiasm!

Guy clearly had a good time, and it's fun to watch.

 

[GeorgeToledo]

Eh MicMan, I think you know the answer, or at least you've seen it manifest on message boards including this one many many times - it's much easier to critique others than do something of similar effort yourself. Or to put it another way, negativity is too easy.

It’s fine to criticize someone for bad teaching that can have the real world effect of making someone’s life more difficult.

Poorly teaching while protesting that you aren’t a teacher isn’t exactly constructive or admirable.

The thing this person is effective at is ramming through pseudo-intellectualism, creating controversy from having done so, and putting a fun house mirror warp on reality.

Poor education, disinformation, and related, are the cause of so many societal issues that it’s hardly a surprise when people can’t help but recoil against it even when the topic seems pretty low stakes.

The best thing any of us can do is remember not to amplify this behavior when we see it across various contexts in life. I made the mistake to start, so I carry on with some discussion of it for now. But next time!

 

[RoadrunnerOZ]

I think there’s a lot to be gained from videos like this, maybe helping to simplify things for those that don’t know much about the internal workings of a microphone - it also demonstrates that there are huge differences in sound from different mics and the attempt to nail down what causes those differences is more what the vid appears to be about. I found it very entertaining.
Using a 57 as a benchmark, being the probably most common instrument mic out there, is a cute way of seeing and hearing those differences without using or having any reference flat line response.
The thing is also that each manufacturer of mics has their own method and test facilities for giving their mics a response curve and polar response diagram so “flat” from Sennheiser may well be different to AKG, Neumann etc. so for someone without access to those facilities it’s a novel way of comparing mics.
I’ve found that bypassing the specs sheets and the “suggested by the manufacturer target field of use” and listening to different mics in place - experimenting with distance, surrounding acoustic environment and mic approach angles can then give an answer to whether or not a certain mic is useful for that instrument in that place with that player (or vocalist, drum/drummer etc.). And then there’s the choice of pre-amp……
The results are often surprising in either a good (or a bad) way, but hands on experience with mics and pre-amps certainly helps shortcut the whole process, which if a client is paying for the time in a studio they are not going to want to pay for experimentation - not unless they can’t get the right sound.
Two different players on the same acoustic guitar won’t necessarily need the same mics.
I recently went through the process of trying lots of different mics for choosing good room and overhead mics for drums for a specific live room, one to be permanently placed wall mounted (not so often used), the other with a floor position, both at different distances from the in-house kit. Then we did the same for overheads. We settled on a Reslo RB for the floor mic and found a sweet spot distance and height wise and just put a tape X on the floor and it has its permanent height fixed stand - that mic coupled with a pair of Coles 4038’s as overheads give a pretty amazing drum sound - since then in subsequent mixes, the individual drum mics get brought up to the overheads instead of the other way around as was the norm here and the room mic gets brought up at the end for room sound. Prior to that we had been using C451’s or 414’s pretty well all the time as overheads and not having the overheads so present in the drum mix, for the tests we tried a lot of different mics in different configurations and spacings. The results were not quite what we expected.
After all we don’t listen to signal generators in anechoic chambers for entertainment.

 

[cyrano]

It’s fine to criticize someone for bad teaching that can have the real world effect of making someone’s life more difficult.

Poorly teaching while protesting that you aren’t a teacher isn’t exactly constructive or admirable.

The best techs usually are bad teachers. I know because I run several small teams (electricity, plumbing, roof, carpentry, gardening) and when newbies need to be trained, I tend to pick the ones who have the patience needed to teach them.

While they don't know everything, they are capable of teaching the fundamental knowledge. The better techs seem to forget that the pupil knows nothing about the subject and the pupil usually gets totally lost and demotivated.

 

[soapfoot]

Whether or not the work in this video is to be criticized or celebrated depends, I think, on how we’d answer two questions:

1) do we consider this person a publisher of educational materials? Is their work likely to be received as instructive/conclusive by a large percentage of the audience?

2) Do educational publishers (even informal ones) have a duty to ensure, to the best of their ability, that the information they are publishing is complete and accurate with respect to the current state of the art?

While I understand why the first question would be debatable, I think I’d answer “yes” to both. So I can understand why someone might feel less-than-impressed.

A lot of successful YouTube content begins with someone asking a question and seeking the answer. This is much more entertaining than an expert simply lecturing in their field of expertise, and tends to rack up more views.

Within this framework, the ideal scenario is when the questioner displays genuine intellectual curiosity and humility (this creator does!), has background in the field, and exhibits rigor and discipline in their thinking (perhaps more-debatable in this case)

Intellectual curiosity and humility alone are plenty noble. However, I do think that rigor becomes very important if trying to prove a negative (i.e. a “myth busting” framework). That may be the very hardest thing to get right.

In such cases very easy to reach specious conclusions (and inadvertently mislead) if the methodology has even the tiniest flaw.

 

[Sebass]

for me the best part about that video is the fact, that it was bringing me to this forum.. I did not know that there was a diy scene for mics etc and Im glad I discovered it because it seems like you don't need to spend 3000 euro/dollar to get a nice mic.. now I need to build one and test it..

 

[cyrano]

Another one to consider: The Micbuilders group.

https://groups.io/g/MicBuilders/topics
Not a forum, but a mailinglist. Some members here are also on the list.