Dynamic vs Condenser Microphones

okay there's a slight chance that today's video is going to ruffle some feathers and I apologize in advance so there's this opinion that goes around the audio community that Dynamic microphones are better for people in untreated spaces and the idea is that because Dynamic microphones are inherently less sensitive than their condenser counterparts that they somehow pick up less noise from the environment and the crazy thing is I hear so many smart people in the audio space giving this advice Dynamic microphones are not better for your audio but they're actually in fact more noisy and this argument is missing some serious Nuance a dynamic microphones are considered less sensitive because as that sound pressure level comes in it has to move the diaphragm as well as that coil that's why they call it a moving coil microphone and because that coil adds a lot of weight to the diaphragm system it takes a lot of sound pressure levels to start moving which means that it's a heavier hole assembly which means it's less sensitive and that's where most people jump to their conclusion that Dynamic microphones will pick up less noise in their space now this is the Nuance that's often overlooked the noise in our space is a set level there's not nothing that we can do to bring down the noise in our space short of acoustic treatment so this means that the level between my voice and the level of the noise in the room is fixed as one comes up so does the other as one goes down the other does as well this is what we call signal to noise ratio there's nothing that I can do to change this signal to noise ratio short of eliminating noise or getting closer to the microphone getting closer to the microphone more signal the signal to noise ratio improves as I back away I blend in with the noise in the room so the signal to noise ratio uh gets worse dis improves with the opposite of improve root lessons why can't I think that word weird anyways now this is the part that I think gets forgotten a lot is that because Dynamic microphones are inherently less sensitive they require more gain at the preamp so to match my voice on both a condenser and a dynamic microphone the dynamic mic will require more gain well guess where a massive source of noise comes from in your signal chain it's the preamp it's the gain that's where you introduce a lot of noise to your signal so microphones like the Shure sm7b which everyone Raves for for using it as a streaming microphone or for podcasting is one of the most gain hungry microphones on the market meaning you have to completely crank your gain to get that microphone loud enough which means you're introducing a ton of noise into your signal so what does have an effect on the noise in our signal well there are two things one is gain so we want a microphone that has high sensitivity because that means we can keep our gain really low and the second thing which has more to do with ambient noise is polar pattern really that's the only tool that we have at our disposal to eliminate back noise is using polar pattern short of using like noise rejection software stuff like that so which polar pattern then is the best for rejection well to answer that let's turn to our friends in the live sound world because live sound Engineers are the absolute most genius human beings when it comes to rejection no not that kind of rejection I'm talking about audio rejection and almost every mic that's used on a stage is a cardioid microphone you can also go to hypercardioid which will pick up a little bit more from behind the microphone but a little bit less than cardioid from the side of the microphone so if you're using a keyboard I would recommend a cardioid microphone because it's going to reject everything from behind if there's nothing behind your Source a hypercardioid may help to address some of those side issues as well so that's it a sensitive microphone so you can keep your gain down with a cardioid pattern to reject the background noise is really the best tool you can use wow okay uh this looks stupid but let's go but what I'm going to do is play a tone through a speaker and I'm going to get all of these microphones set up to the same input level adjusting their gain to get them there so of course the two Dynamic microphones are going to take a little bit more gain than the two condenser microphones and then I'm going to come back and talk through these and you'll notice that as I talk the level should be the same through each of them also the level of the noise should be the same through each of them and to test that I'm going to play some music from a speaker over there behind the camera I'm going to turn on my dryer which is one room over that way uh let's see what other noise things I can make maybe we'll just do that so a dryer and some music playing hopefully there'll be some audible noise and you can hear that it's going to be hopefully the exact same in each mic that's my hypothesis but we're going to test this and of course to anyone saying this doesn't look very scientific it's not this is not at all you're along for the ride with me uh we'll see if this works so the first microphone here this is the Moana pd100 XLR it's around 50 and this microphone is actually really nice for the small form factor I really do like it um sits on the boom quite nice and this is the one you're listening to throughout the video so I'm gonna go ahead and be quiet for a second okay next is our first condenser this is the universal audio sp1 condenser microphone a pair of these cost 2.99 and I did a video on these if you want to check out these microphones as well but let's go ahead and take a listen to some silence Okay the third option here is a dynamic microphone this is Old Faithful this is the Shure sm58 which runs for about a hundred dollars built like a freaking Hammer gotta love these things but let's go ahead and take a listen to some silence and the fourth and final option here is a condenser microphone this is a paluso p12 which runs for about two thousand dollars and let's go ahead and take a listen to this this is a large diaphragm condenser well I don't know about you guys but I'm really struggling to hear a difference in the noise quality between each of these microphones they sound a little bit different but they're also just in different spots they're different microphones they're gonna sound a little bit different okay let's take a look at these audio files before I do that I just want to show you this is using a cheap interface what happens with gain when you crank it um that's why it's really important to use a microphone that has a high output and a good sensitivity because then you don't have to crank your gain so much but anyways beside the point so what you're looking at here are the four different audio files that we recorded during that section and you can see right here is the registration so whereas blasting that um that frequency ideally if you're doing this properly you're going to use like a full frequency this is only really giving you a snapshot of this process and you do some fancy software to calibrate the microphones to the same place but I don't really have that Tech available so this is kind of the best we can do this is microphone one which is the mayonno and it's sitting around negative 38.97 we jump over to the sp1 and that's at negative 37.9 so about within a decibel this is the Shure sm58 38.14 so it's yeah right on par and this is 37.64 so we're within about half a decibel between these four microphones again it's not super scientific but within half a decibel you're not going to really have a discernible difference let's go ahead and look at the noise because this is what we're concerned about uh this is to prove this point here now one small thing I'm going to avoid this second clip here because if you look the music was actually in a different spot in the song and it didn't have the hi-hat going as you probably noticed when you watch those clips so let's just look at the two Dynamics and a condenser microphone here but let's go ahead and highlight a section of this again we're going to look at this total RMS level this is going to tell us how loud that file got during that time so let's take a highlighted section here of the Moana microphone and we're looking at negative 55.16 let's jump over to the sm58 negative 56 so slightly quieter than the mono in terms of noise and let's jump to the condenser so this should be a much worse figure negative 57. I'm they're completely on par as predicted uh in fact the condenser has the best performance at 57.68 57.2 55 yeah so the condenser is showing us the least amount of noise and I mean we're within half a decibel that's not really it's kind of negligible we're in an untreated space it's not really a scientific experiment but I think that this does prove at the very least that a dynamic microphone is not better in an untreated space so what microphone is best then for podcasters or streamers there's a few things that go into this debate there's proximity effect if there's durability there's form factor which like as I mentioned with this meono uh what is this pd100 XLR it is really tiny and it's easy to move around I I quite like this little form factor be way better than something chunky like this two thousand dollar paluso p12 here but if the main thing that you're trying to accomplish is addressing noise in your signal the very best thing that you could do is use a condenser microphone not a dynamic with very low self noise with a high sensitivity letting you turn your gain down and that's in a cardioid polar pattern but mostly you gotta consider the sound don't be a goof that's the most important you're not a goof but just you got to listen to the sound they're microphones that's what they do they make sound go listen

Channel: Randy Rektor

Views: 20,456

Keywords: dynamic microphones, microphone, dynamic microphone, audio, review, shure sm7b, demo, podcast microphone, condenser vs dynamic microphone, dynamic vs condenser, dynamic vs condenser mic, dynamic vs condenser microphone, condenser microphone, dynamic mic vs condenser mic, condenser mic, dynamic mic, difference between dynamic and condenser microphones, dynamic microphone vs condenser, condenser microphones, condenser, home studio, home recording, mic, dynamic microphone for streaming

Id: R5n6r8frees

Length: 8min 59sec (539 seconds)

Published: Mon May 15 2023