"We use a simple Neumann U87 microphone as the house-standard microphone at all of our facilities. They’re expensive, but that’s what we’ve used for years."
The problem isn't the mic though, it's that in the earlier days of radio there was a trend towards boosting the bass artificially in the microphones to make the host sound more authoritative. Howard Stern is BIG time guilty of this. NPR doesn't do this, and cuts the bass picked up by the full-range mics using a channel EQ (or mic built-in) to eliminate plosives rather than employ lots of pop screens and boosting the bass. Using a full-range mic for vocals means ultra low-end is preserved, and that's not always desired for replicating the human voice accurately. This is also how most vocals in music are treated, there's no reason for all that low-end mud, so they're high-pass filtered heavily as a matter of course before the rest of the vocal effects chain is applied. Pop vocals in particular are way thinner than people realize.
As far as mics go, if you don't want to pay thousands for a Neumann, the Austrian Audio OC18 is a fantastic mic with a similarly flat response and has a 3-way switch for different levels of high-pass filtering before the signal even leaves the mic. It's fast becoming my favorite mic to use in the studio.
To clarify a bit, I think that, by "artificial", you mean the boost does not correspond to how the human voice actually sounds, which is true.
But in another sense, it's not artificial. It's a natural side effect of the physics of how microphones work. In building microphones to be directional (favor sounds from, say, in front), they've also made it where the amount of bass picked up is heightened when the mic is very close.
So NPR is artificially (with a high-pass filter) removing a natural side-effect (of directional mics) to avoid getting artificial-sounding boomy bass.
Also, this is one of those accidental invention things where what was originally a side effect has turned into a valued, essential feature. Like guitar amp distortion is part of the electric guitar sound. Or like how resonator guitars (Dobro, National) were invented to be louder but now people like the tone.
There could also be a cultural aspect of this. In English, the lower you speak, the more respectable you are. It is borderline ridiculous when you listen as a foreigner (when voices are cutting off or rattling), until I learnt how to use it myself ;) Anyway, I speak with much higher pitch in French, and perhaps the bass mic is important for English speakers, but wouldn’t have had such an effect on European radios, where, maybe in Spanish, high frequencies would be important because the faster you speak, the more interesting you are? Consonants are much more important in latin languages.
I haven't noticed this so much in English, but it's egregious in Spain, where actors in shows speak an octave lower than their normal voice. It sounds very forced to me.
The basic vocal technique for a deep voice requires relaxation. Different parts of your body resonate in different registers, and the “deep” voice is usually a chest resonance. Trying to force it creates tension in your chest that interferes with your voice.
I just realized how true the thing about the faster you speak the more interesting you are is in Spain, France, Italian... Pretty terrible for a language learner though.
> But in another sense, it's not artificial. It's a natural side effect of the physics of how microphones work. In building microphones to be directional (favor sounds from, say, in front), they've also made it where the amount of bass picked up is heightened when the mic is very close.
> So NPR is artificially (with a high-pass filter) removing a natural side-effect (of directional mics) to avoid getting artificial-sounding boomy bass.
He says later on in the article that they try and get people in the studio to not talk directly into the mic but across it. So in some ways they are trying to correct for the issues caused by strong directionality before they get to artificial things like signal filters.
So, this is not quite correct. Talking across it means that you are aiming your voice to the side of the microphone, but the microphone is still aimed directly at your mouth. It’s not the directionality of the microphone that is an issue, it’s the air coming out of your mouth.
Low frequencies carry an awful lot of energy and you will get maximum dynamic range out of a mic by close-micing but HPF'ing off the lows early in the chain. Many condensers have little preamps inside them, and the HPF may be placed before this pre giving it effectively a lot more headroom.
It’s because a HW circuit is easier to engage, more reliable, higher fidelity and requires less maintenance.
I don't know if you’ve worked with modern audio software but its truly a tangled stack of complexity, incompatibility, license management, etc etc. It can sound and work great once set up, but its touchy stuff when it comes time to make changes, update the OS, etc. as we all know software is notoriously buggy which is far from ideal in a live scenario.
Two contributing factors, I suspect. Most importantly software can only deal with whatever hits the digital side; physics and electronics being what they are there are lots of places to lose information on the analog side. If you filter out that range before you add gain you probably get way better SNR and don't have to rely on some ridiculously sampling and high resolution to not lose things. Second - they have been doing this a lot longer than sophisticated software pipelines have been available.
Software pipelines only began to get into radio some 20/25 years ago. NPR started in 71
Also software can't do magic (and you aren't processing each microphone digitally), you want to be your signal to be as best as it can as close to the source as you can make it to be.
Disagree, because the issue here is where the filter is. As others have noted that a condenser mic has an internal preamp, it is most useful to filter inside the mic before amplification to preserve S/N ratio. I suppose you could do that with software in the mic, but that seems like a lot of effort for maybe a worse result.
Further down the audio path it eventually makes sense to digitize, but if you didn't have the HPF in the mic your noise floor will be worse.
I may be wrong (its been a long time since I read it, and it may be just something that fits really well thematically with the book but wasn’t actually in it), but I think that was Michael Crichton’s Congo, not a Steven King book.
I always figured it had more to do with the kind of systems were using back in the days of old - flat and dull sounding by default. Most cars I remember being in, in the 80's and 90's maybe had quad 4" speakers with no tweeters, and a portable radio or walkman was pretty lo-fi sounding as well. So the bass and the highs would be hyped up to make it sound better for the average listener?
You can also just go for the similar Neumann's that are lower down in their line. I have a TLM 103 and recommend it highly, although it doesn't have the high-pass switch so you'd want to do that via software or preamp.
> Pop vocals in particular are way thinner than people realize.
Thanks to near constant use of auto-tune I think most people realize pop vocals are thin.
Edit: clarification to remove accidental contradiction. I initially ended with "... I think most people realize that," which would have essentially translated to, "Most people realize that pop vocals are thinner than most people realize."
Autotune and melodyne are just standard now. Good usage is not really detectable. What people forget to note is that you still need to know how to sing in the first place. Autotune plugins can only do so much...
These plugins really exist to save time for large studios, not make bad musicians better. Time is money for studios, so they don't want to waste it on multiple retakes when someone can be close enough to make small fixes with melodyne. For session work, market effects still pressure people to, well, not make mistakes like that. A great singer is still going to be in higher demand than a decent one, because then the studios don't have to spend much time at all fixing their vocals.
Also, -noticeable- autotune can be desired. It's a musical choice. In that sense it's no different than using a vocoder, etc. I personally do not like it but that's the beauty of music; there's something for everyone.
I used to not like autotune at all in music, but then I think I heard an interview with Grimes (?) who basically said (paraphrasing) "oh, I love autotune. Yes it's artificial and detectable, BUT it brings the vocals even closer to the music, which makes a more powerful impression.
Ever since then, it's not bothered me nearly so much when the vocals are tuned. The track hits harder. Yes: it's true the voice loses some of it's natural beauty, but in turn, you get music and voice that follow perfectly.
I think the big difference there is trying to use it to just hide imperfections vs. consciously making it a conspicuous part of the music. For someone like Grimes, adding in blatantly artificial manipulation fits in perfectly with the rest of her aesthetic.
Autotune used as an artistic style is something I used to dislike out of... snobbery, I suppose. It's a perfectly valid choice for an artist.
Now, I really hate hearing it in kids' songs. Sung by kids, for kids, and sounding so flat and blah. Much like laments against modern "beauty" productions, I think excessive autotune presents kids with an unrealistic expectation for their own voices.
It is totally detectable, unless it truly is a one off tweak. But that is almost never what happens. Maybe a great vocal will get a tweak to save otherwise great take, and that is fine. Good thing.
But then the whole production sees similar things all over the place and it gets cleaned right up technically. Time, levels, the works right?
And the energy is diminished, could be lost.
Like fashion, this will all cycle in and out. Young people hear the humanity in music made prior to these and other tools and it appeals.
Little things, like a change in tempo, small vocal errors, inconsistency, all add up in a track.
I bet some time from now, could be as little as a decade, maybe two, we will look back at all this and chuckle.
Like you say, there is nothing technically wrong with any of this tech. And it could all be used very differently from how it is today too.
Recently, I have been going back through great live shows. Fantastic! And I still get that tingle from the realization someone delivered it live, to a crowd. And yeah, not so perfect, but oh so very human too.
Good application of it is not, no. When we hear obvious autotune vocals, it's a deliberate aesthetic choice.
I believe what you're talking about is how modern production is about producing "perfect" song recordings, and mapping everything to a click track/beat grid. Now that is totally noticeable compared to music made a few decades ago. I do agree that it makes music sound sterile. This is separate to autotune/melodyne being used.
"I bet some time from now, could be as little as a decade, maybe two, we will look back at all this and chuckle."
Maybe the main industry studios will, but music in general isn't determined by what those folks are doing. There are more indie publishers than ever, and so on.
for what its worth T-pain has pretty conclusively proved that he didn't need autotune, he just used it as a gimmick to stand out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjXUg1s5gc
A short, but hopefully relevant anecdote: I play the sax. A musician friend called me last summer to get me to do a part on a new song he’d produced. Since it was during the summer surge I said I’d do it at home and send him the part, but he mentioned he had a Neumann mic for me to record with. I was curious, so I packed up and went to his place which he’d set up largely outside. I played my parts, then went home. When he sent me the result I was floored! I’ve never sounded so good - seriously. I asked him what plugins he’d used and he’d just added a touch of reverb, but nothing else. It was all me and the Neumann mic. Those things really do have a magic quality about them. There’s a reason people are willing to pay more than the cost of my sax for one.
Neat, I play sax too and one of the best live mics I've used at jazz fests was the RE-20, the same one they talk about in the article as a next best. Now I'm even more curious to try the Warm Audio imitation U-67!
Thriller (and tons of music before and after) was recorded on the Shure SM7. You can buy that mic for $400. In fact, you've seen this mic used by podcasters everywhere.
The mic cost is almost irrelevant though. A good mic will last decades unless abused. Let's say you want a variety of sounds. You buy a bunch of instrument mics (probably $100 each) and a few matched pairs of all the most popular vocal mics (most of those will run 1-2k per pair). You'll probably not spend over 20k in total. Over 20 years, that's only $1,000 per year or less than $100 per month. In that same 20 years, you will have upgraded your digital equipment several times at an expense far greater than $1,000 per year (upgrading your $3,500 macbook every 4 years is the same amount of money).
If you make your money with those mics, that cost is hardly worth mentioning. It's like people complaining that ergonomic keyboards cost $300. The keyboard will easily last a decade or more (only $1-2 per month to save a lot of future pain). In that same time, you'll probably spend 10k+ on other equipment. Same thing with monitors where $1000 will far outlast that same amount of money put into the computer itself.
Drastic differences between the three! The Røde is certainly acceptable for most circumstances, but the Fifine sounds like absolute crap in my opinion.
The Yeti is popular because it's a USB microphone and it got in early. It's not a bad microphone (at all, somebody telling you it is wants to sell you something) but it's generally misapplied in most settings where it finds itself.
For simple spoken-word stuff like conferences or streams or whatever, something like a Samson Q2U or an AT2005USB/ATR2100 are less sensitive to unwanted noise and easier for an untrained user to get a good sound out of, while moving into the XLR space gets you access to better dynamic microphones and also some pretty reasonably priced condensers that do quite well (though there's some up-front investment in the audio hardware, of course).
I own a yeti (and a yeti pro) among quite a few other mics.
It's actively bad for most people for one reason: capacitive mics pick up everything.
If your room isn't soundproofed, it will be very hard to keep noise out of your recording. Dynamic mics are much less sensitive in this regard.
I would instead recommend a Samson 2Qu or Audio Technica ATR2100-USB on the low end ($70-100) or the Shure MV7 ($250) on the high end for plug-n-play mics.
If you want to move into a cheap audio interface (eg, Focusrite Scarlett Solo + cloudlifter), I'd recommend either the Shure SM7b or the ElectroVoice re20 on the higher end and the Shure sm57 on the cheaper end (good enough for the president to use for the last 40-ish years).
> It's actively bad for most people for one reason: capacitive mics pick up everything.
This is a myth that's popular with podcasters. If you get as close to a condenser mic as you must with a less-sensitive dynamic mic* and crank down the gain accordingly, you'll find that condenser mics don't magically capture more ambient noise than than dynamic mics.
* Using a fist as a measure, your mouth should be between 1-2 fists away from the mic.
With a good preprocessor (I use a Symetrix I got from an old radio station), I can crank my dynamic mic (EV RE320) to levels that will pick up anything happening in my entire house, with my office door closed.
It's just that the levels from condenser mics tend to be hotter, so by default you hear more stuff in the room unless you get in close and turn it down.
There's no way to replicate the 'radio' sound if you're 2 or 3 ft away from the mic.
I have a yeti and XLR mics and lavalier mics. For ease of use without hassle the Yeti is good but you must use the right setting and account for gain. It picks up a decent amount of ambient sound. That extra noise will muddy your vocals. I’ve gone the route of a simple lavalier setup for most of my video calls and presentations.
For what it's worth I'm an audio engineering expert, produced albums, broadcast stuff, and used to review professional studio audio equipment for a living for a national magazine.
People like it because it's simple and it looks cool.
If you want something that has the same basic usability, ie plugs directly into USB and is really easy to use with computer audio, buy the Apogee Mic Plus.
I recently experimented with pretty much everything in this category and was very happy with this model, bought a dozen of them for use in a virtual conference series, where I wanted something I could send to non-technical people who'd never be able to navigate a pro audio interface. I've been very happy with it so far.
Sony C800, anyone? With parts for manufacture being hard to source for Sony, I’ve seen these for nearly 20k, list price (not sure if they actually get that much), second-hand.
But then, professional equipment never had economies of scale.
Almost nobody uses mics like C800gs for podcasting and radio, though. The Sony c800g is one of the best vocal mics in the world, generally it will be found in high end studios. A U87 is very expensive for the purpose of radio/podcasting. The RE20 and the Sure SM7B are very popular for podcasting/radio and are around $400. NPR certainly aren't the only people that use U87s for radio/podcasting but they are in the minority. U87s are probably the most popular studio mic in the world for professional studios recording vocals but for this application it is accurate to call a U87 expensive.
For podcasting yes, but it seems like an insignificant cost relative to the rent, talent, and transmission equipment in an analog radio station. Are $3000 mics actually rare in radio studios?
From my experience yes they are rare. So rare, I've never heard of a radio station that uses U87s. I've only ever worked on one radio show and we had an SM7b. You can watch a lot of radio stations live video streams these days and you will probably not find a single U87. It will be all RE20s and SM7Bs. It isn't as if a radio station has a single mic. So the calculation is ($3000-$400) x number of mics purchases per year. Radio stations use their mics for hours and hours everyday, they get a lot of wear and tear. Additionally, the SM7B is a dynamic mic and is probably more forgiving in noisy environments than a U87. I know Joe Rogan is a podcast not radio but he makes millions of dollars off of his show and he uses SM7Bs.
I will also say, the NPR person interviewed seems to have a negative view of the RE20 and SM7b compared to the U87. Despite the low cost, SM7Bs are actually popular studio vocal mics. One was famously used to record Michael Jackson's vocals on Thriller (actually it was an SM7 but I believe the SM7B reissue is almost identical). When recording voice, there normally isn't a "silver bullet" mic that is the best for all voices.
From Sony, but check Reverb... Sony has been out of stock for over a year now. The diaphragms are hard to produce/source, so second hand just keeps going up without Sony putting new units out.
Was curious. ~$3600 for the mic set.