Quote:
Originally Posted by spottydog10
Looking at the Yep thread, I just tried this:
"Take a favorite CD and play it through your monitoring setup and record it with the most accurate mic you own, placed about where your head would be while mixing. Then take that recording and play it in the car or on the living room system or on headphones or anywhere else that you're familiar with.
Do NOT expect it to sound the same as the original CD-- it's won't. Even with a perfect set of speakers in a perfect room, the very fact of sending the audio out through open air creates new phase relationships, introduces a layer of mechanical resistance that attenuates highs and smooths out dynamics, and all kinds of other stuff. That's normal, and why it's better to mix on speakers than on headphones-- so that you mix based on what the audience is hearing, not based on the signal being sent to the speaker cones."
To that end I recorded direct from the CD of Catfish and the Bottlemen (in mono to match the mic) and then with a Rode Nt1a at the listening position.
I'm being a bit thick here but what do I conclude from this test?
Anybody help me out here? 
https://soundcloud.com/mike-spot/cf-1
https://soundcloud.com/mike-spot/cfmic |
I ran a similar test a few weeks ago after putting up my Quad ESL-63's electrostatic loudspeakers as my studio monitors for the first time ever (boy, what an experience that was!!). After listening to my entire music archive for a few days I had the idea of putting a pair of Neumann KM 184's on front of them to find out how close the mic'ed loudspeaker's sound would come to the original media player signal. I was impressed by the small amount of coloration in the recorded sound.
Here's a (fun) video showing the comparison between the original signal and the mic'ed Quads:
.