ah.. i'm thinkin' i'm liking 3 the best.

mebbe i'm just a snare sound freak... but all the attack and ring seems most unmolested in the third iteration of all of 'em!

my previous comments were for the second run with 2 mics.

I've been known to if I get the chance.

Sure, I would. Whatever sounds good is good. Why do we always use dynamics on the snare, again?

Because they stay crunchy in milk.

i guess it's more a testament to the troglodyte drummers i record ;)

'hey drummer-- why is there a stick through the grille of my mic?'.... a) wut

kidding- although i gotta admit to've not having done that ever to my memory.. :wheelsspinning: hrm...

I admit to enjoying the sound of an LDC on my snare. I have been mic'ing the snare's side almost below the rim though, so when i use any mic, it is actually very difficult to get a stick on.

I actually have a pretty lo-fi foam gobo dealie strapped to the dynamic i use when i need the LDC for something else, that doesn't do a hell of a lot for the intended porpoise of blocking the hi-hats, but i left it attached, because it makes a softer landing spot for drumsticks, especially when i record other drummers. I don't feel that i play particularly precisely with regards to where the sticks land every time, but i tell you, i am like a robotmachine compared to some drummers. Even as a drummer myself, i am consistently surprised by what other drummers consider will be in their way in a mic placement. And they are right too, because i have watched them hit them. All the more reason to go for simpler mic setups with few or no close mics, i guess.

Oh, also, it was probably around the same time that i started using the LDC on the snare, that i realized how important the lower mids in a snare sound really are to me. My CAD TSM411 dynamic is certainly brighter/snappier/crackier, but the LDC has a much better lowmid representation, and in my setup with my bass/guitar sounds, it makes a huge difference for the better.

It would be nice if the LDC was hypercardioid though, one of the main upsides to the TSM.

Lowmids = "Weight" of the snare. You gots to have some weight!

True dat, homes. I confess to ignoring the low mids of the snare for too long. Go figure, I think it took working with a drummer whose normal snare sound is on the tubby side for me to really pay attention below c.400hz or so.

Those fuckers go down lower than you'd think. A 100hz boost can be totally legit on the right snare.

Probably the last of these comparison clips i am going to do. I will explain why in the middle of this poast.

This time, with much louder guitars in the basement:

MXL990 Mod Tests - Loud Guitars Version.

I would say that these show moast easily the moast obvious differences between the mic's sounds. I just set up all three mics again with capsules as close as possible to each other, and about maybe 6-8 feet off of the cab. Telecaster+chris_dhomebrewmap+terrible crate4x12.

There is also some Hotcake-as-a-fuzz on the moar heavily distorted ones. They will be obvious because they somehow sound even cruddier. I just wanted to hear it with extra too much fizz and see if it made much of a difference, more so than making things sound good. That is generally my M.O. with guitars anyhow though. Tough shit.


But yeah, louder guitars make the differences really pop out i think. In fact, i find that the quieter and less distorted the source is, the smaller the differences are between the mics. I did another round of acoustic ones, and started to do some voice ones, but aborted the pursuit halfway through, because honestly the differences were not remotely pronounced enough to bother making them right enough to poast.

Actually, the first less scientific test i did right after the mod seemed to show a much more pronounced difference between mics for acoustic than the better one i did last night. I think i must have done something silly the first time around. The microphones do have obvious differences, but in none of the quiet tests have i found it to be enough to think too much about.

This loud guitars test is a whole other story though. Considerably more so even than the quieter electric one i did first of all. Here i almost felt that maybe i had put one of the microphones backwards or something, due to its sore-thumb-sticking-outness. That is actually (vaguely) possible, but i have already taken the mics down so i cannot check. The levels were about even between all mics though, so one being backwards seems less likely. Though, the guitars were very loud and in a small concrete sort of room...

In fact, check out the concrete wall slapback on that last one here. I wonder if i DID put a mic backwards, if it might sound more or less the same anyhow due to the bouncybouncy sound on all sides.

Are these in the same order as the last drum comparison clips? 'Cause that's how it sounds on my end. B is the odd one out. A and C sound similar-ish, but the difference does seem to be more exaggerated here.

As for preference, here I liked B the most, followed by C and A. (Save for the last riff, where I actually preferred A.)

And I'm wondering if I didn't guess wrong as to the mystery mic the first time around... Without listening back to the originals, I suspect B might be the unmodded 990? Though I still suspect C is the modded mic. And I am probably completely wrong.

Yarr, all of the 'three microphone' tests are in the same order.

Sometime tomorrow eve or so i think i will let known what one is whatyo.

You know, the more things i change on this thing, the more i am beginning to feel, that "mic modders" are quite possibly pretty well full of shit.

Changing shit does indeed make the things sound different, don't get me wrong.

But i really just don't know if it makes them sound... better. I certainly would not neccesarily advise that anyone just blindly do the screenmod thing.

Anyhow, i did some cap mods. I don't know if i will poast any clips at this stage though. For one, with the grille mod done, it isn't really apples/apples between stock and capmodded.

For two, i don't know that it makes any *useful* difference. Anyhow. One of them is supposed to, and does in fact, as evidenced by the spectrum analysis, increase the mic's performance down a couple octaves. The problem is, while it is clearly visible on the graph that this is occurring compared to stock, the sound of it is not at all very apparent. Which seems SUPER counter-intuitive, but really that is just what i am hearing. Like, maybe what it is letting through is just too sub-octave to even matter?

If i get anything useful recorded i will post more clips, but as it is i seem merely to be stoking my own skepticism the more i change, and the more i record the changes.

On the upside, now that i owe Joey a new 990( ) i feel slightly more comfortable doing some more invasive mods to this one down the line, playing with altering the capsule and its backplate, shroud, and housing, that sort of thing. Very much like the screen mod, it is within the backplate housing and shroud, where the frequency response of the microphone is mechanically manipulated, versus the electrical manipulations(which when you are talking about a microphone that already basically goes 30hz-20khz doesn't leave a shit tonne of room for "expansion/improvement") of the cap swaps.

In a purely technical sense, it is also within these mechanical areas that the polar pattern is defined. For instance, the 990 is already a pretty wide cardioid, but technically a more or less full on omni pattern would be doable pretty easily(though it may sound shit at it ). From what i have learned via my internetnerdstudies recently and what i have experimented with IRL so far, the big changes are really in the shapes of things and how far they are from each other, much less than how the circuits are arranged. The circuits themselves are moastly very well established oldschool German things anyhow. Some things are not done as well as the original Schoepps/Neumann/whatever, but it seems much more a question of degrees, than of wild missteps and errors in the Chinese translations.

A correction. ONE of the comparisons showed the cap mod producing more low end.

This one, which is sampled from some acoustic guitarring:

It didn't SOUND like it to me though, so i just ran a fucktonne of semi-scientific tests with sine sweeps and white and pink noise.

And this is more typical of what i got out of those(This is just pink noise straight up.) :

In the acoustic one, green = mod, red = stock.

In the pink noise one, orange = mod, blue = stock.

Interestingly, but unrelated to anything else, both give obvious visual proof of the 20-120hz insanity that i have suspected for a long time, lives in this room.

But also, it is showing that for what is made to sound like a huge sonic change in the cap mod(being that i went to different values for this round, not just types) simply is not that.

What i changed would in theory have the biggest effect on the low end, but aside from the one (evidently fluky) acoustic test, nothing supports this. And even on the fluky acoustic test, my EARS didn't support it.

I now most wish that i had gotten semiscientific from the beginning. At the moment i am really wishing that i had some pink noise samples, or any samples recorded comparing both mics in stock form, for instance, before the screenmod.

At that point i did listen to them and record some short bursts of guitars, just mainly to say "yes they do sound pretty much the same unmodded". And now i am REALLY wishing that i could go back and look more closely at that and see if, say for instance, the one i left stock, might have started out with a bit more low end in the first place or something?

Grrumph.

man, regardless of the 'inconclusive findings', the experiment's totally worthwhile anyhow! that's fun stuff, even if it means you need to buy another mic.. but 990's are supa-cheap anyhow. i had one for a hot minute and ended up selling it to geoff from old crow-- 'cause i bought it for the shock mount i sold it to him for, i think, 30 bucks. but i played with it first, and for the scratch?! sheeit.. it really is hard to believe that it sounds pretty damn good anyhow-- why NOT shoot to make it better! it didn't sound radically different to my 67s-- mebbe a bit brighter.

what kinda cap/s did you put in it?

i think that most of the mods that folks like mike joly do are either swapping fets and the whole bias circuit for the amplifier and 'upgrading parts'... they seem to do the grill mod a bunch-- but i wonder if when they change the bias, if it makes them brighter, negating the sorta artificial brightness from the grille?

i'm thinkin too that mebbe when you change the cap (did you change value, or just type?)-- that if you changed value at all if it contributes to the 'rise before cutoff' scenario. i know that crossovers do that, and also some ribbon mics.. i wonder if that carries over-- i know it's a common filter thing- and mebbe that explains the new bottom bump?

super cool stuff-- thanks for posting all that! gargh.. i totally want to go get a passel of mxls now..

There are basically two spots in this mic's circuit that see the most return for capswaps.

The first and most say: most important, is the input cap straight off the capsule. Anything you put there is going to get the absolute bejeezus amplified out of it by what comes afterwards. The stock cap is a multilayer ceramic, 0.001uF. I tried most of what i had available: the stock, a poly .001uF, a silver mica .001, even some funky different values like 470pf(which depending on era and manufacturer were alternate choices for various Neumann and Schoeps circuits like the one the MXL is based on).

It gets a little difficult because there is no way to quickly swap the caps in order to a/b them. The mic has to be diss- and re- assembled every time the things are changed. The spot is too sensitive to use alligator clips in(wayyyy to much fucking additional noise to be useful) and the circuit is not grounded correctly unless the body is screwed together all the way.

Anyhow, without being able to PROPERLY a/b (meaning no mic movement in between takes at all, no level changes, the exact same performance for each, etc) and thus get a really good idea of the differences, i will say that they were not anything to write home about. Meaning, it was nothing night/day obvious from test to test. CERTAINLY not between the mica/ceramic/poly types of the same value. And honestly, not a huge massive difference in between the 1000pf and the 470pf either. I would expect much bigger obvious changes from fully doubling or halving the value in that spot. Perhaps they would be there if the original basket was there to accentuate them? I don't know. Would need to do some much more serious tests, only, from the very start.

The other cap spot is in the output section, there are two, again multilayer ceramic 0.22uF caps, one per side. The most commonly suggested course here is to go to a high quality poly film cap at least the same value, and ideally, bigger. I went ahead and put a full 1uF value in, and nice Panasonics at that for both. The previous posts show and explain what i found with that change. Michael Joly himself suggests that such a change will increase the mics low end sensitivity/cutoff down two octaves. Others seem to dispute this, due to the actual things that are going on in the circuit, and after listening to the change, i would be inclined to agree with those other people, even before i looked at the circuit. Dropping the highpass two octaves is a thing that anyone will notice. UNLESS, perhaps, it is two octaves below (this mic's listed bottom end of) 30hz... Then you would have to wonder just why exactly a person would even want or need to do that...

Also, it is very interesting to me, that in reading and searching, i have seen just about zero, of what i am looking for here.

Meaning, for all of the Joly posts(99.9% of which begin with a link to his webstore ) i have read, i have not yet seen him or anyone else post a soundclip that compares a stock chinese mic to the modded one. And i mean, a full: "1. Here are two stock mics, you can hear the similarities/differences. 2. Here are the SAME mics, but one has been fully modded while the other remains stock."

NONE of the modders do that. That in and of itself is kind of red flaggy to me. At least it is, in retrospect, now that i have gotten into it a bit to see what kind of changes we are actually talking about these mods MAKING.

Almost all of the popular mechanical mods make the mics essentially darker. When Joly reshapes the front of the MXL603 and cuts the rear vents bigger, or ditches the shroud on the MXL990, what it is doing is UNdoing various Neumann or Schoepps "tricks" that the chinese manufacturers had copied in. Those particular original tricks(aside from the front end of the 603 one, where the MXL version is a deviation from the neumann, which joly tries to un-deviate) were there for the function of adding treble peaks, on purpose. Fine idea for a nice smoove highqualitycontrol german capsule, maybe a bit much, for a ubermassproduced dirt cheap chinese ripoff version that tends to lean from "bright" towards "harsh".

Then he, and all of the commercial mic mod doods really, sort of just don't ever post any direct comparisons between stock and mod. Only ever between expensive German Icon and lowly modded mic. But, like, these crappy mics sound pretty darn okay from the getgo. Maybe what would be more helpful would be some comparisons between the Neumanns and the stock MXLs?

I would certainly like to hear the stock vs. mod part anyhow. Is it BETTER? or is it different?

Kind of like this MXL 990 i have here. Definitely different. Is is BETTER? It isn't as "spitty" or "sibilant" or any of that shit, all similar things to what you will find on oktavamod or gearsluts boards, right? Is that BETTER?

The fact that i basically have decided that i need to buy tor a new mic, would seem to indicate that i cannot exactly say that it is.

Does the modded one just sound kind of dull and middsy? Maybe it does. Way less "spitty treble", "sibilance" and "harsh high end smearing" though.

I have further to go with that poor microphone, but yeah, that is about where i am at with it at this stage.

OH.

And i forgot to say what the last three sets of audio clippage actually WAS.

So i will here. If you don't want to know, don't read the rest of this, etc etc.





















































For all three of the three-microphone ones, "Drums 1", "Drums 2", and "Loud Guitars", the mics are:

Mic A = MXL990 Modded
Mic B = MXL990 Stock
Mic C = MXL2001(stock)