So, as promised I have the three way shootout of the three way shootout between the Sennheiser HSP 4, Countryman E6 and I threw a wireless SM58 in there because it's a microphone that all of us audio guys are familiar with in it's frequency response. I apologize for the less than perfect video quality Part of the reason is that I'm not that great at finding the right settings for video file compression to get it look good while still keeping a smaller file size. Though it sounds like there's some slight high frequency detail lost, this is the typical setup for our video encoding to web for our Sunday morning services. I highly recommend using headphones for this as the differences are not noticeable on computer and laptop speakers.
My one caveat to this that slightly corrupts this test is that I forgot to bypass the compressor that hits our video inputs so, yes the sound of the mics is not entirely natural, but our typical compression is only about 2dB to 5dB of gain reduction when our pastor starts to get excited and really project so it's not that heavy on this video. My own personal opinion is that the E6 over accentuates the nasally tones in my voice's upper-midrange detail. Sort of 1kHz to 3kHz area. And there's not much natural fundamental frequencies in below 300Hz on this mic that sound good. My voice is slightly nasally to begin with but this mic leans me more to sounding like Gilbert Gottfried. You know, the guys who voices the Aflac duck? No offense Gil.
The Sennheiser HSP 4 sounds very natual. There are fundamental frequencies that add body. I was expecting a lot of low frequencies from this mic being that it has a cardioid pickup pattern and would accentuate proximity effect, but it didn't. The nasally quality is not there as well. The sound is more neutral, and I like how the high frequencies sound on this mic. In the room on Sunday morning I loved how clean the mic sounded. Rather than Pastor Josh sounding slightly synthetic and that he is wearing a mic, he sounded like he normally does when we just have a conversation which was a huge win.
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| Is this a Microdot connector?? |
Working with the mic on Sunday morning I loved the sound of the mic first service with the EQ bypassed, but one of my volunteers Chris, a former recording engineer felt the desire to tweak the EQ to make it sound better. Looking over the settings on the console between the E6 settings and the Sennheiser settings we did about half the work of getting it to sound right as we would on the E6.
The EQ settings for the E6 channel has a 100Hz high pass filter and then the EQ is set as HF Shelf: -9dB at 20kHz, HMF: -9dB at 700Hz, Q= 1.4, LMF: -12dB at 220Hz, LF Shelf: -2dB at 160Hz. Crazy EQ setting yeah!? My thought too. There's gotta be something I'm doing wrong. The E6 has several capsule filters that change the frequency response of the capsule. I have the neutral filter on the capsule and even still the HF shelf at 20kHz is there because even with the natural capsule that doesn't boost high frequencies we have issues of feedback above 12kHz. And those are feedback frequencies that are very painful. The two mid band EQ's are what I'm shocked by. Why do I need that much EQ to make it sound good or neutralize feedback frequencies?
UPDATE: what I forgot to mention is that getting this mic to test for a few days meant that I got to torture test it with a few voluneers. So I put it on and cranked it as loud as I possibly could. I figure the house level was around 75-80dB. And then only when I went into the house standing in front of the PA and talking (and annoying the band members who were arriving to set up for rehearsal) did I hear the slightest beginnings of feedback. But that was standing in front of the PA!! END UPDATE.
I'm trying to arrange for a demo of the DPA 4067. For you DPA users I was told that the connector pictured above is the MicroDot connector, I have never seen one, is it? Still no word on when the DPA demo will happen but I'll keep the posts coming on what is going on. Stay tuned!
