In our article Experts Name Their Favourite Microphone we found a single uniform trend amongst the responses. No-one shared their pick with anyone else! If the job of a microphone is to capture sound as faithfully as possible you might think, in the very nearly 150 years since Emile Berliner’s carbon button mic was invented, microphones would all be so similar as to be indistinguishable from each other?

This of course is far from the case. Mics are better than ever but they also vary wildly. If you haven’t yet checked out Audio Test Kitchen then it comes highly reccomended. They have over 300 microphones which have been auditioned in a repeatable, consistent way allowing meaningful comparisons to be made.

If you look into what went into setting up the methodology behind Audio Test Kitchen you’ll see that this is hard to do properly. But while Audio Test Kitchen allows standardised auditioning of mics (remotely via a website!) it does less to answer the question of why they sound so different and what really makes a difference to the sound of a microphone?

What Makes A Microphone Sound The Way It Does?

YouTuber Jim Lill created a very popular video last year which asked Where Does The Tone Come From In An Electric Guitar? In that video he took an electric guitar and eliminated variables one by one so that the contribution of each component could be isolated and assessed. To many the results were as surprising as the video was entertaining!

In the video featured in this article Jim has turned his enthusiastically determined approach on to microphones. I must confess I thought he might have bitten off more than he could chew when I watched the beginning of this video. However, over the course of this 30 minute video things get more interesting. His amateurish test rig with an old guitar cabinet and a dual concentric driver is of questionable value and little of the testing is blind, but by the time he gets to his ‘popcan’ mic he’s got my attention. There are lots of things to take issue with in this video but I still think it’s very worth half an hour of anyone’s time.

What do you think of this video? Share your thoughts in the comments.