mic sens

[RockyJ]

I see where a lot of people purport to use low sens settings. One may want to look into this further for their mics.

I did a quick test and will test again with better controls but the hi sens and lo sens have different results in quality.

I did a recording with lo at 20/30 and hi at 14/30. It was an outside recording at night with low volume distance traffic hum.

I increased the volume on the low sens by 10db and here is a view of each.

as you can see the white noise is throughout the spectrum and it sounds very rumblely bassy, while the hi sens clip is brighter and doesn't show the white noise.

hisens:

[attachmentid=1338]

losens:

[attachmentid=1339]

[A440]

This is a very intriguing result.

Those of us who have been using MD from the old days still use low sensitivity as a matter of course, because high would overload with almost anything louder than conversation.

And once upon a time, I think Dex Otaku compared high to low and found that high worked like low cranked up, with basically the same amount of noise once the low-sens signal was amplified to the equivalent playback volume.

Your results seem different. Does the amplified low-sens sound as loud as the high-sens?

What recorder and mic are you using? Any further experiments you can do would be welcome.

[RockyJ]

I'll come up with something better on the dynamics, after all I used two different levels and that is not good since I don't know what db's those levels are referenced to.

I'm using aiwa stereo mic no model, I opened them and found the condensers number 'cm 18 wb'. I can't find specs on them on the web.

the recorder is sony rh910.

I'll be back someday not too far off with some more experiments.