Choosing a mic (MD 421, e906, AKG C214, SM57, STC 2)

Dear all,

I'm trying to pick a mic to record mainly guitars and some vocals. I've been researching around and found a few options:

1. Sennheiser MD 421 - Full bodied Cardioid mic. Versatile for acoustic instruments and voices as well. Not sure if it responds well right in front of a cone? Priced at S$575

2. Sennheiser e906 - Known to be built for guitar amps. Retails at S$275. How good is this? And is it good for vocals as well?

3. AKG C214 - Widest 20-20Khz range, but also the most expensive (slightly above MD421 at S$600) Is it worth the price?

4. Shure SM57 - This is a dynamic mic which I might just buy it together with another condenser to capture lower frequencies.

5. Sontronics STC 2 - Sinemax selling S$375, lifetime warranty. Supposedly good for all instruments, voices including Guitar Amps. Not sure how good is that?

6. M-Audio Nova - Cheapest Condenser around. I already have one actually, but it tends to clip when it gets loud (I wonder why coz I don't think my voice is THAT powerful? :/ ). If it's not too much different from the rest, I might just stick to this one coupled with a SM57.

Any experts out there can advise?? Thanks!

Glenn Fong

Quantity cost efficiency first over quality luxury.
Have an sm57, with a condenser. Get the hang of it first and juice out its worth, you can use the condenser for vocals at the same time. Then when the itch you've scratched opens a bigger wound, go buy something better, your experience by then will compliment it. Have fun

guitarman78 said:

but it tends to clip when it gets loud

Click to expand...

Sounds like you have a headroom problem. Try manually adjusting your pre-amp gain down on the loud sections of the song, or get a hardware compressor to control dynamics before hitting your converters.

What audio interface and pre-amps are you using?

Many people tend to overlook the importance of good converters and pre-amps in their recording chain. Clocking errors in cheap converters will affect your sound and produce distortion in your signal.

Here is a good article on sampling error in analog to digital conversion.

You may also want to consider trying out the Prism Sound Lyra.

I had a musician friend plug his $300 condenser microphone into his Scarlett interface and do some vocal recordings. He immediately came back asking how he could improve the sound with eq and such, complaining about the 'boxiness' quality of the mic. We then proceeded to record that same mic through the Prism Lyra pre-amps and converters. He could straight away hear the big difference in clarity in his voice and said to me "that's not what I heard from the Scarlett.. " with a sigh at the end - He knew that he needed to spend some more money to get the quality he was looking for in his production.

I then told him, yes you still will use eq in your mixes, but it will be more for sweetening purposes and less for corrective eq, and mixing will be more enjoyable.


Your Nova and SM57 are fine ( I think the Nova sounds pretty good actually for its price ). I would suggest to focus more attention on your pre-amp and converters.


Joel C
Sales & Business Development
CDA Pro-Audio
www.cda-proaudio.com
Australia - New Zealand - Singapore - Thailand - Vietnam - China
(65) 9756 4007

Thanks for your advice! I'll Stick to sm57 and Nova for now then. Experiment with more later!

is the shure 58 good ? or the 58 beta better ?

Shure SM7B