Having to stay in a sound-wise medieval croft for the next couple of months could make me think to invest in proper acoustic room treatment – or: to get a new microphone. And this is what I did. I ordered the Neumann TLM 67.
Originally, I was up for a Neumann U 67 Reissue. However, price and portability really made me hesitate.
So, when it arrived yesterday, I quickly tested it with a short recording from my kitchen desk (speaking directly against a window).
For the recording, I connected the microphone to my Sound Devices MixPre-3 II. The microphone was set to cardoid and had its internal high-pass filter enabled.
As I did not have a fitting microphone shock mount, I had to hold the microphone in my hand during the recording. So sorry for any unwanted noise.
As a side note: I temporarily mounted the TLM with cable ties to my Rode SMR shock mount. It works remarkebly well, so I will leave it for a while. At least as long, as have something better, such as a Rycote InVision USM.
The mixer was running NoiseAssist at -6dB and also had the high-pass filter enabled (as 120 Hz w/ 18dB/octave). The latter should not have a significant effect to it, as the built-in low-cut filter of the microphone covers a much wider range, as you can see in the diagram below:
The only change I did in post was to level the Loudness to EBU128 (-23 LUFS).
Below are two samples: the first is a short recording with freely spoken text from Instagram. The latter is the “Planet Earth” Descript sample training script from coda.io (a 30min version on YouTube and a 5min version of the raw 48kHz/24bit WAV file).
So far I am incredibly enthusiastic about this microphone. The sound (at least for my voice and in that environment) is incredible (and incredibly better than the other microphones I tested here). Finally, a microphone that sounds really well out of the box – even in more unforgiving environments.
As soon as the OverDub voice is ready, I will do some tests and post them so we can compare the difference in speech synthesis based on a high(er) quality microphone.
And maybe, I still go for a Neumann U 67 to see how the difference between the two mics is. We’ll see …
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