# 2012 State of the Calibrated Microphone



## Anechoic (Jan 16, 2009)

My fellow Americans/citizens of the world: The state of the calibrated microphone union (at least with respect to the Behringer ECM8000 and the Dayton EMM-6 mics) is... mixed.

*Dayton Audio EMM-6* - it seems (although I'm not 100% positive) that Dayton has switched suppliers for the 3rd time. In any event, the days of the EMM-6 being a relatively cheap, yet flat mic are long since gone. They are still a good bargain, but I've seen maybe 2-3 relatively flat mics in the last year-and-a-half, most of them have a rising response above ~ 12 kHz. The low-end is still a winner compared to the ECM8000; the EMM-6 mics tend to be about -12 to -8 dB at 5Hz, compared to -30 (see below) to -12 dB for the ECM8000. 

Quality is getting worse - I'm seeing about 1-2 per 100 mics that are bad out of the box. This is much better than what I'm seeing with the ECM8000 (again, see below), but somewhat disappointing considering I saw zero bad mics in the first several hundred I measured.

Noise floors are still fairly low at around 30 to 33 dBA, but sensitivities seemed to have decreased somewhat from -38 to -40 dB to a current value of around -40 to -42 dB. The FR spread over large sample sizes has definitely increased over the last couple of years. However, if you manage to get to mics with consecutive serial numbers (Dayton SN's, not mine), chances are good they'll match to within +/- 2 dB.

*Behringer ECM8000* - sigh. Just... sigh. The good news is that over the last year, mic sensitivities seemed to have increased such that most mics are around -36 to -38 dB or so. The other good thing is that the flattest mics I've seen over the past year tend to be Behringers. Those are the bright spots.

By pretty much every other measure, the ECM8000's have taken several steps back. If you're lucky enough get a flat mic, it will be fairly flat, but the majority of them have frequency responses that are all over the place - I'm seeing plenty of mics with +8 to +12 dB peaks above 10 Hz. ECM8000 noise floors which used to measure around 33 to 35 dBA tend to measure around -35 to 45 dBA now. 

The worst part if the quality has gone to [expletive deleted]. If anyone has ordered an ECM8000 from me recently you may have noticed that it may take me a while to ship your order. Part of that is my schedule. The other part is that I'm seeing a large number of mics that have problems out-of-the-box, so I may have to wait for another shipment to actually ship you a mic that works. Overall I'm seeing something in the range of 20% of mics with problems, but there have been times where I order a 20-30 mics, and only half of them are usable. 

One of the biggest problems I see is with the low-frequency response, where some mics are -20 to -30 at 5 Hz, and -10 dB or more at 20 Hz (compared to more normal values of -15 dB at 5 Hz and -3 dB at 20 Hz). Some of the less awful ones I'm selling at a discount, but the other ones I have to cajole my supplier into taking back, and they seem less and less willing to do so (unless the ECM8000 is DOA or has another readily apparent problem, which all too many of them do).

(Speaking of the discounted mics, I'm selling a few of these "special" ECM8000 P+ mics at the discounted price of $50 on the ECM8000 seller page under the "discount" tab. I'd really like to get rid of these mics, so I'll offer an additional $10 off the discount ECM8000 mics for HTS members, just leave your HTS username in the "message to seller" box on the PayPal page and I'll refund the $10.)

*In conclusion:* if you're going to order an uncalibrated mic, you should definitely order the Dayton EMM-6 mic if for no other reason than a) it's cheaper, and b) it's much more likely to actually work without having major high frequency or low-frequency problems. However don't expect that any EMM-6 you purchase now will live up to the mics that PE was shipping back in 2009.


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