I received my Faust tube microphone last week. Yesterday I was tracking some demo songs with an artist I produce and we took the time to do some mic comparisons between the Faust, my former vocal mic (an AKG C414 B-XLII) and my also recently purchased Shure SM7b.
The guy sung to the 3 mics in front of him at the same time, so the take is the same for every clip. I didn't use the HP filters on the AKG or the SM7. The preamps were those on the Prism Sound Orpheus, which run the conversion too. I set the preamps for each mic to hit -10dB on Cubase input meters. Faust has a really hot output, even more than the AKG without any of its onboard attenuators on. As expected, the SM7 has the weakest output.
I tracked the guitar with various mics too: Faust, Neumann KM184 and Royer R-121. I kept the Faust version for these clips, as I liked it the most. The Neumann sounded a little too bright in this situation and the Royer sounded a little dull (I probably should have positioned it further from the source instead of aligned with the other two, and maybe using its back side).
The clips are mono exports of guitar and voice channels, both channel faders at 0dB. Gain diferences between the three vocal tracks were pretty unnoticeable. I put waves L2 to maximize the volume of the clips, maximum attenuation occurred being -1dB. No other processing took place.
The three contenders are not the same kind of mic at all so the test wasn't aimed to decide which one's the best of its kind. I'm really glad to have enlarged my mic palette with both the Faust and the SM7.
I was surprised by how good the SM7 sounded to my ears, considering its price point in comparison to the other mics. I wouldn't be ashamed of using it as main vocal mic if I didn't have an alternative.
My older AKG sounded kinda hyped/artificial to me compared to the other two.
I liked Faust's top end and was the overall preferred in this shootout. There was something around 1KHz I found annoying. I could improve it with a narrow cut of about 6dB. The clip doesn't feature this cut.
Well, here's my contribution
