As some of you folks know, my remote rig has lots of channels of Millennia HV-3. I just love these things! But mostly on the basis of Ben's reports, I'd put a Pacifica on my wish list. Recently one showed up used, and I bought it. (Thanks, Tree!)
Here's a quick comparison on voice and guitar (Santa Cruz small-body). It's a single take that had to be done quickly because my wife isn't much interested in being recorded. I used a pair of TLM-193's, one on guitar and one on vocal, and there's a lot of leakage between them, which is always a challenge. I just stood there wearing a pair of Sony phones and moving mics until it seemed to work. Then I hit record.
The mic lines are Y'd to both the Millennia and Pacifica preamps, with the former providing phantom. I didn't use the Pacifica pad. This setup is probably a bit unfair to the Millennia, because its got a much higher input impedance than the Pacifica, and the Pacifica ends up setting the mic loading. I picked the TLM-193's partly because transformerless output stages aren't too sensitive to loading. The four preamp outputs were sent to a LynxII card and recorded into Sequoia at 88.2. Unfortunately, what you folks get to hear has been downsampled to 44.1 and MP3ized using VBR.
The first two files should be self-explanatory -- nothing but level adjustment and panning.
Millennia Bare.mp3 Pacifica Bare.mp3
The "Hybrid" file has the Millennia on guitar and the Pacifica on voice. The last file has a bit of processing. Just some low end shaping on the guitar and notching some glottal rasp on voice. The guitar also has a bit of compression.
Hybrid.mp3 Hybrid EQ Dyn.mp3
After hearing lots of remarks about the "big" Pacifica mid-bass, what I hear in this comparison is rather the opposite -- I think the Millennia is bigger sounding. The Pacifica mid-bass is, um, interesting. Sort of smeary, as I hear it. I wasn't wild about it on this particular guitar. But I think the Pacifica top end is quite striking. It was my favorite on the vocal.
I hope some of this comes through in the MP3's, and I hope you folks find it interesting.
David L. Rick
Seventh String Recording