Has anyone else noticed the budget market's obsession with Chinese condenser microphones the last few years? Has anyone else noticed the emergence of new ribbon microphones on the high end market?
Yet, no one put a Chinese ribbon microphone out at that magic $200 street price point that seems to go with the introduction of new Chinese mics until Nady brought out the RSM-2 recently. Prior to the appearance of the Nady RSM-2, ribbon mic choices tended to be American or European with street prices starting at $600 and up.
How good is the RSM-2? The answer, in my opinion, is
very good. I have used this mic on a variety of sources, and the
results were almost always usable and in many cases excellent. In
addition, it compared very favorably to a popular and more expensive
ribbon, the Royer R-121.
When I first received the mic, I put it to work immediately in an
overdub session with Kris Doty, a female singer-songwriter.
Upon pulling it out of the box, I was struck with its stunning good
looks. It's huge, and it sort of looks expensive.
I first tried it on my cheapish glockenspiel, where I suspected it could tame the metallic high end. It did. Furthermore, I would say that the Nady is the best mic
I've ever used on glockenspiel. I usually need to apply some fairly
radical EQ and compression to "glock" tracks, but these tracks
required no processing and sounded great.
Next, I used the Nady to mic my Fender Princeton amplifier, which I was using for a distorted, bowed string bass part. It did a superb job. The track sounded a touch dark, but that's what we were going for.
Some sources it did not work so well on in this session were vocals, where it was a little too flabby in the low end and dull in the high end.
After that session I was fairly pleased with the sound of the Nady.
However, because I was fairly inexperienced with ribbon mics, I had no
framework within which to judge its relative quality. So, I contacted
Todd Harper, a local project studio owner, who agreed to help me with
an A/B comparison between the Nady and the Royer 121. We both went
into this comparison with the idea that any comparison between a $200
mic and a $1,000 mic would be inherently unfair, but that we would try
to take that into account when evaluating the Nady. Little did we know
that, not only was this comparison fair, there were some tracks where
one or both of us ended up preferring the Nady over the Royer.
We did the comparison at Todd's studio, West Wing Audio, which has a
Radar system (great AD/DA) and several quality preamps, including the Great River MP-2NV we used for these tests. We tried to match placement and preamp
settings as closely as possible between the two mics. We also tried,
whenever possible, to use both mics simultaneously to record the same
performance to eliminate that as a factor when evaluating the tracks.
We have to admit that this testing is a little incomplete, since we
were unable to record any brass, woodwind, or strings in time for this
review to be written. However, if we end up doing further tests, I
will update this review.
We began our tests with close mic'd guitar amp, an application that
the Royer is quickly becoming ubiquitous in. In my opinion, the Royer
clearly beat the Nady in this application. Todd felt that either track
was equally acceptable and that choosing between them was simply a
matter of taste. In either case, the Royer had a mid-range "bite" that
the Nady just did not have, while the Nady had a bigger bottom that
that Royer did not.
On male vocals, the Nady had more body and air than the Royer, which sounded boxy, nasaly, and a little lo-fi. On tambourine, the Nady sounded open and present, while the Royer again sounded boxy and a little lo-fi. We did another recording of
glockenspiel, and the Royer and Nady were both excellent, though, in
my opinion, the Nady edged out the Royer by just a little bit. On
acoustic guitar, the Nady and the Royer each had their strengths and
weaknesses, with the Royer's mid-range "bite" being particularly
flattering on picked notes and the Nady's airier top end sounding
quite nice on strummed parts.
At the end of these tests, Todd and I were quite surprised to see how
well the Nady compared to a mic that was five times its price. There
was no clear winner in this comparison, and we fully expected there to
be. Because of this, I can only come to the conclusion that the Nady
RSM-2 is a microphone that deserves a place of solid respect in the
ribbon world. At this price, this mic should be in everyone's mic
locker, from the lowliest home studio to the million dollar room with
the SSL.
Bottom line: A budget choice that exceeds expectations. Highly recommended. Street is $199. You can also find what Mojo Pie believes to be the same mic badged as the ShinyBox 23 for $165 street.
Link relating to this review: Nady Systems
Jeremy Jensen can be found at his Mojo Pie blog, Surveying the Slopes, and recording quality indie artists such as Kris Doty at his studio.
