I feel I should apologise for saying Len is making himself look like a fool.
That was uncalled for. The fact is, we chose the Zoom F8 because that is the most commonly used portable recorder, and is the recorder most likely to be used by owners of ambisonic microphones, due to the fact you can trim link the channel gains, the portability, sound quality and value for money. One microphone being less sensitive than another is not something needed to take into account as it is simply a fact of life. I would suggest the number of people who own a lower cost ambisonic microphone and also have access to a Millenia HV3 is vanishingly small and not representative of the real world use of the microphones we tested. The above is the reason we did not ‘overlook’ the low sensitivity of the Coresound Tetramic and Octomic we included in the comparison test. We used one of the recorders recommended by CoreSound on their website for use with the Octomic. The gain setting we used is on the edge of the linear EIN range of the F8 preamp. If you repeated your F8 vs HV3 experiment at 38dB you would see an improvement over 30dB, hence my recommendation users of Octomics and F8s should avoid gain settings much below 40dB. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image0.jpeg Type: image/jpeg Size: 602800 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/private/sursound/attachments/20231111/bbf9bbdd/attachment.jpeg> -------------- next part -------------- All mics were treated equally. The Millenia being a quieter, and much more expensive, preamp is not relevant to the study. I would greatly appreciate it if this discussion ended here and no further doubt is cast on the usefulness of the study. The noise improvement given by adding capsules is not relevant to this study. Listening to recordings of microphones is. Thank you. Jack Reynolds Sent from my iPhone > On 10 Nov 2023, at 21:00, lenmoskow...@optonline.net wrote: > > One additional comment: > > At the very low end, the Zoom F8 is roughly 15 dB worse than the HV-316. > > As you add gain on the F8, the errors get more and more audible. > > > Len Moskowitz (mosko...@core-sound.com) > Core Sound LLC > www.core-sound.com > Home of OctoMic and TetraMic > > > ------ Original Message ------From: lenmoskowitz@optonline.netTo: > surso...@music.vt.eduSent: Friday, November 10, 2023 3:33 PMSubject: Re: A > comparison of fifteen ambisonic microphones > When recording the self noise of an OctoMic using the > Millennia Media HV-316 and Zoom F8 (both with 30 dB of > gain), while the time domain noise levels look roughly equivalent, > their noise spectraare quite different. That's what accounts for > the degradation when using the Zoom F8. > > At low frequencies (below 250 Hz), the F8 is five to ten dB worse > than the HV-316. At higher frequencies (1 kHz to 20 kHz) it's around > 5 dB worse. > > You can see the noise spectra here: > https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=kZPTocVZ53w7P5SUFM5dsF0QpHlmvH6sPR8X > > So the Zoom F8 penalizes mics that use low sensitivity capsules. It > makes the self noise sound much worse than it really is. > > The folks who ran the comparison test seem to have overlooked this. > > > > _______________________________________________ > Sursound mailing list > Sursound@music.vt.edu > https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit > account or options, view archives and so on. _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound - unsubscribe here, edit account or options, view archives and so on.
