Microphone comparison: Sennheiser MD421-II, Neumann TLM 103, Electro-Voice RE20 with or without Pleiades gentle slope high pass filter (130 ohms, 20mH)

Only the RE20 was tested with or without Pleiades filter and its internal low cut was on at both cases. The test was done on 24011817 date time code at SNFCC studios. 2 women and 2 men of young age, active in the audio engineering were the listeners. The test was quasi blind in the sense that Lefteris was playing the different files, so he knew, Fotini, Fey might had been influenced by him as he was the first to vote everytime, and i may be biased as i could more or less guess which mic with filter was which, but the rest 3 of us did not know which mic file had been playing through the Genelec coaxial monitors. Kelly who had booked the session did not turn up being ill so it was decided to record Fey singing Hurt - Cristina Anguilera using the original backing track from the CD single. The recording room is small but treaed acousticaly. Mic was in front of singer at bout say 8-9 inch. i would have possibly prefared 12 inch for less proximity effect and from 45 degrees above singer's head. but we did not do much mic placement tests. An objective of this test was whether we could make a vocal sound as good as Christina's. And whether the Pleiades filter would make the sound close to that without further EQ. 1st mic is MD421 with its low cut almost full, (I guess it would have sounded better with full low cut). While we were testing before recording (mabe greater mic distance) i was impressed with the clear sound of this microphone. Score out 0f 10, Le:6, Fo:6, Fe:4, Ge:5 (George). Total:21 2nd mic EV RE20 with Pleiades in line filter. Le:7, Fo:8, Fe:7, Ge:5, total:27 3rd mic Neumann TLM 103. Le:9, Fo:9, Fe:8, Ge:3, total:29 4th mic EV RE20 with its low cut only, Le:7, Fo:5, Fe:6, Ge:3, total:21 i gave on 2 cases 3/10 as i was hearing bass heavines compared to Christina's original backing track + vocal that we were comparing. Lefteris commented that he was imagining how the TLM will sound after eqing it. We were happy that on the higher rated cases we could approach the quality of recording of Christina. Fey did a great singing job. Many thanks to all participants and SNFCC. The files may have been deleted.