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U47 against the dark horse Lomo 19a9. You decide.

I just bought a Lomo 19a9 off ebay 2 weeks ago. I finally got it hooked up today and so during a mixing break we set up a quick blind taste test. I didn't have any qualified singers so I set up a 60's J45 with some older strings and tried to get the capsules as close together and at equal distance from the guitar through matched pre-amps.

http://www.douglasgrean.com/mic1.aiff

http://www.douglasgrean.com/mic2.aiff

So which do you think is which.

Disclaimer: these mics were kind of set up in a hurry so the placement isn't optimal but good enough to hear the difference.

PS I noticed the 19a9 had a lower output gain then the 47. Is this typical?
PPS These are aiff files but they're short. I wanted to keep the quality high.

Guess away.

I'm going with sample 1 as the U47.

really?

damn i'll go with the opposite just to hedge our bets.

oh, and what preamp did you use for this.
anything else on the signal except the pre?

r0ck1r0ck2 wrote:really?

damn i'll go with the opposite just to hedge our bets.

oh, and what preamp did you use for this.
anything else on the signal except the pre?

Sorry I forgot to post the signal chain info. Both mics are plugged directly into an Avalon 2022 stereo mic pre, the most uncolored pre I have up right now. And the levels were adjusted to try to make them match as well as possible. No compressor. No EQ. No effects.

The strings were really old on the guitar and I didn't really spend much time on placing the mics other then trying to get the capsules as close together as possible. Since the u47 is a very big mic I had to have on mic upside down so the bottom of the 47 is just touching the bottom of the 19a9. I used a flashlight to line up the capsules. The guitar is about 2 or 3 feet away. I was trying to keep the mics farther away then usual because I didn't want either capsule to be "reading" a different part of the guitars body surface. Because we all know that different parts of an acoustic can sound drastically different.

I'm doing this blind because when I did it in the studio we all knew which was which. And both mics sounded really good but knowing which mic cost 8k and which mic cost 1k was fucking with our heads. It's hard to keep the deification of the U47 out of your judgement.

I should have set this up as a poll but I'm too lazy right now. If people want to know if their guess was correct they can PM me and I will trust you not to spoil the fun. Or after the thread dies off I'll just post it on the thread.

Thanks
Doug

.aiff files.. you bastard.
(i'm on linux)

1-lomo 2-u47

1-lomo 2-u47

Benny wrote:.aiff files.. you bastard.
(i'm on linux)

Sorry

I wanted to avoid the compression/degradation of mp3's. Would wav's have been a more globally readable alternative? I didn't even think about it. Oops.

It's interesting. My 19a9 doesn't sound like any of the 47s I've ever used. Those sound much more similar than I would have suspected. I could probably tell better on a vocalist, but I'll guess, based on listening through a pair of crappy headphones, that the first one is the 47.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC