does mic placement even matter

[JimAnsell2]

If you find the difference negligible, I’d say roll with whatever and focus on something else, no need to complicate and over think things, it just leads to less production and constant second guessing

there is a huge economy based around tonal insecurities, "what-if-ism" / choice paralysis (maybe THAT speaker will sound BETTER!!!), and so forth.
if your crusty old g12-75 sounds good, stick with it. if its close, but not quite, get an eq pedal. If its no where near what you want, start swapping speakers.

Also, mic placement totally matters. i guess you have to experiment to know.

 

[rsm]

 

[DanTravis62]

Mic placement may be the most important thing in the entire recording chain. Even just for phasing issues alone. Ultimately you are trying to capture a specific sound and even a few degree difference in angle or placement will affect the sound more than anything in your guitar or recording chain.

A lot of people do not realize the difference in mic placement because they adjust their mic positioning in the same room as their monitoring. You cannot get an accurate picture doing this. If you have the cab in a separate room, just buy a dynamount and fuck with it for 30 minutes and track different stems and the minor differences in position will be wildly different sonically.

Judging by the comments of people thinking all four of their speakers sound the same (im pressing x to doubt on that)

I'm going to guess none of them have actually paid close attention to the sounds of their four separate speakers let alone, done a lot of careful mic placement while monitoring with reference headphones, so this is probably pearls before swine man

 

[S̷͖͑m̵͎͂á̵̺s̸͚̈́h̴̬̑]

there is a huge economy based around tonal insecurities, "what-if-ism" / choice paralysis (maybe THAT speaker will sound BETTER!!!), and so forth.
if your crusty old g12-75 sounds good, stick with it. if its close, but not quite, get an eq pedal. If its no where near what you want, start swapping speakers.

Also, mic placement totally matters. i guess you have to experiment to know.

Whatifisms are literally why so much of us chase gear

 

[S̷͖͑m̵͎͂á̵̺s̸͚̈́h̴̬̑]

God I love IRs so much!

100%
I loved close micing, but i never used tape. I just kept the mic in that position...until my bastards would knock the mic while playing in my guitar room.

Using an IR is soo good because you just start playing. Absolutely no setup.

 

[nightlight]

Mic placement definitely matters beyond just brighter and darker. Certain positions may hype the bass or the treble and vice versa.

As a matter of fact, if they were the same and you knocked your mic out of position while adjusting something, you wouldn't be cursing out loud like many of us do.

 

[IHateRap]

I only do that when putting a mic on my ir loader isn’t cutting it.

 

[Rackman]

Judging by the comments of people thinking all four of their speakers sound the same (im pressing x to doubt on that)

I will make you a bet. I will record all 4 speakers from my 4x12 cab twice for 8 total clips. Playing the same riff. Same mic, close miced, same offset to cone center. Your job is to pair the clips up into 4 speaker pairs. I'll provide the correct pairing to a 3rd party.

If you get it right, I pay you.

If you get it wrong, you pay me.

You can set the bet size but let's make it large. I like money.

Lots of people claim they can hear the difference between lots of things. The proof is not in the claim, it's in doing it blind. Sadly guitar suffers from the same bullshit as recording and hi-fi folks where people hear with their eyes, wallets, and biases instead of their ears.

 

[DanTravis62]

I will make you a bet. I will record all 4 speakers from my 4x12 cab twice for 8 total clips. Playing the same riff. Same mic, close miced, same offset to cone center. Your job is to pair the clips up into 4 speaker pairs. I'll provide the correct pairing to a 3rd party.

If you get it right, I pay you.

If you get it wrong, you pay me.

You can set the bet size but let's make it large. I like money.

Lots of people claim they can hear the difference between lots of things. The proof is not in the claim, it's in doing it blind.

That's completely unnecessary, and I would be stupid to take that bet - I'll take your word for it that you know your own rig better than I do (whoa shocking!)

The problem is that this isn't the case with a wild majority of people's cabs/rigs, and therefore it seems like it's not exactly good advice to give to people that it makes no difference

I've recorded hundreds of 4x12s and the differences between T75s, V30s and a few other common speakers are obvious and shocking to anyone who has monitored them from another room or with quality reference headphones

 

['63-Strat]

It does matter, and while in a controlled recording scenario I prefer actually mic’ing my cab, in a live scenario these days am just using OX box as is super consistent and soundguy is less able to screw it up. There has only been soundguy this year so far that I was actually impressed with, and that was a silent stage running OX as load box.

I usually do a better job mixing us myself when bring PA then when have a soundguy/house PA these days. That should not be happening but sadly seems is more common than in past.

 

[Rackman]

That's completely unnecessary, and I would be stupid to take that bet - I'll take your word for it that you know your own rig better than I do (whoa shocking!)

The problem is that this isn't the case with a wild majority of people's cabs/rigs, and therefore it seems like it's not exactly good advice to give to people that it makes no difference

The question is how much of that difference is coming from subtle differences in mic placement on the speaker, proximity effects, and/or mic angle/polar pattern?

Because those are things that have well understood and easily measurable and heard effects. Move a close-mic 1/2 inch outwards on the cone a V30 and you get a pretty big difference. Same thing if you move it 1/2" away from the grille cloth.

My 4 UK-made V30s are pretty similar. It may be possible to tell two top/angled slots from the bottom/straight slots with spectrum analysis, but otherwise it's not going to be a walk in the park even with an engineering approach instead of a listening one. There's certainly not one of them that's the magic speaker or anything.

 

[Rackman]

It does matter, and while in a controlled recording scenario I prefer actually mic’ing my cab, in a live scenario these days am just using OX box as is super consistent and soundguy is less able to screw it up. There has only been soundguy this year so far that I was actually impressed with, and that was a silent stage running OX as load box.

I usually do a better job mixing us myself when bring PA then when have a soundguy/house PA these days. That should not be happening but sadly seems is more common than in past.

The average house supplied soundman is BAD. That's just reality.

 

[DanTravis62]

The question is how much of that difference is coming from subtle differences in mic placement on the speaker, proximity effects, and/or mic angle/polar pattern?

Because those are things that have well understood and easily measurable and heard effects. Move a close-mic 1/2 inch outwards on the cone a V30 and you get a pretty big difference. Same thing if you move it 1/2" away from the grille cloth.

My 4 UK-made V30s are pretty similar. It may be possible to tell two top/angled slots from the bottom/straight slots with spectrum analysis, but otherwise it's not going to be a walk in the park even with an engineering approach instead of a listening one. There's certainly not one of them that's the magic speaker or anything.

It's not that one of them is "magical" it's that the slightly different tonal properties can be preferrable for a specific recording, tone, or use case

Obviously there is a bit of noise in the data because of mic placement, but for anyone that has spent a bunch of time micing up guitar cabinets, it is not even remotely controversial that they vary a quite a bit even in the same production run. Manufacturers have tolerances they try to meet, not exact specifications that are completely replicable every time.

There's a million videos about the wild V30 differences on youtube that you're welcome to research on your own if you want, but I'll help.

Listen to the difference between the 16 ohm Chinese V30 at 6:51 and the 16 ohm chinese V30 at 7:32 - if that's "negligible" then I'm Sydney Sweeney.



Are you willing to bet that Kyle Bull completely misplaced the microphone by a half inch for all of these "negligible" anomalies?

How about @the other John Browne 's insanely detailed breakdown? are you willing to call the differences between the same model and type at say 52:57 and 53:20 in these recordings as another case of misplaced micing? Perhaps the placebo effect?




I'm more than willing to believe that you lucked out and have a 4x12 of speakers that sound very close to the same, but there is a veritable mountain of evidence that your cabinet and experience is the anomaly here.

 

[Rackman]

In the first video obviously those sound radically different. But he's changing the cab. That's not a controlled test of the speakers. Nor presumably was it intended to be, but come on... that's not evidence of different sounding speakers.

Also I'm not going to watch the entirety of a half hour video to try to find it, but does he have some process for consistent mic placement?

In the second video he's controlling mic placement (good) but seems to be working with used speakers with different histories unless I'm misunderstanding something. Some of the cones are visibly at least slightly damaged. I would expect differences from that.

 

[DanTravis62]

In the first video obviously those sound radically different. But he's changing the cab. That's not a controlled test of the speakers. Nor presumably was it intended to be, but come on... that's not evidence of different sounding speakers.

Also I'm not going to watch the entirety of a half hour video to try to find it, but does he have some process for consistent mic placement?

In the second video he's controlling mic placement (good) but seems to be working with used speakers with different histories unless I'm misunderstanding something. Some of the cones are visibly at least slightly damaged. I would expect differences from that.

You are correct that different cabinets and histories will affect this, but they exaggerate differences that are already there, and you can hear that in tons of other cabinets with 4 of the same model/production run speaker

It's very common in a 4x12 for say, two speakers to sound almost exactly alike, one to have a more strident high end, and one to be quite a bit ballsier and have more low end

If you have a 4x12 of speakers in the same cab, that came from the same production run, are you more likely to have them sound the same? Sure, of course - but that isn't even close to a guarantee that they will sound the same. In fact, the vast majority of the time there are audible, tangible differences.

 

[anomaly]

I've had a bad tone gig or two because of poor mic placement. Different parts of the speaker sound different. Like if you place the mic where the glue blobs are it will sound different than the other side of the speaker.

 

[ZEN Amps]

It matters if one speaker sounds better than another, not because of which hole it’s in. If you think the individual speakers in your cab all sound the same then it doesn’t matter. At least in live sound, I have no clue about recording.

Speakers aren’t very consistent. The difference between any two might be minimal but it also might be substantial depending on your luck of the draw.

Use your ears. Put a mic on each of your speakers and listen for yourself.

These first two replies kinda nailed it.

The comments about moving the mic around are also spot on, it really matters. So much so that we built this thing to do just that. Heavy, bulky, over-engineered....but a lot of fun via the remote in the control room. Great for tracking sessions, but have also been shooting IRs with it lately - real timesaver.

 

[thegame]

These first two replies kinda nailed it.

The comments about moving the mic around are also spot on, it really matters. So much so that we built this thing to do just that. Heavy, bulky, over-engineered....but a lot of fun via the remote in the control room. Great for tracking sessions, but have also been shooting IRs with it lately - real timesaver.

View attachment 446819

Nice. You can put something else there in lieu of the microphone and nail that G spot every time!

 

[DanTravis62]

These first two replies kinda nailed it.

The comments about moving the mic around are also spot on, it really matters. So much so that we built this thing to do just that. Heavy, bulky, over-engineered....but a lot of fun via the remote in the control room. Great for tracking sessions, but have also been shooting IRs with it lately - real timesaver.

View attachment 446819

Dude that thing is awesome. I've heard of the dynamount of course, but that is the sort of home cookin' that I love to see. There's nothing like being able to nail the exact tone you had during a previous session.


I will put an even finer point on @TheGreatGreen correct statement that guitar speakers aren't very consistent - the standard QC tolerance range for the vast majority of speaker manufacturers is +-3DB, so a 6db range. Contrast this with high end monitor speakers which are often in a 0.5DB range for consistency.

The human ear can perceive differences of 1-3DB.

So even if by luck of the draw, your 4x12 has four speakers of the same manufacture that sound super consistent, and even using the company's own stated figures (that they are using to brag about their QC) there are certainly perceivable consistency differences between the same manufacturer's run of speakers.

There are, definitely, higher end cabinets/speakers that have higher tolerance values, I believe, but most of the time they are "factory matched" by ear - this is common with the high end builders, and more expensive/high end factory made stuff.

And according to the google machine, there are a handful of guitar speaker manufacturers that use the Monitor/FRFR tolerance range for better consistency, but my google-fu isn't strong enough to find which brands those are.

 

[Rackman]

The comments about moving the mic around are also spot on, it really matters. So much so that we built this thing to do just that. Heavy, bulky, over-engineered....but a lot of fun via the remote in the control room. Great for tracking sessions, but have also been shooting IRs with it lately - real timesaver.

Well of course moving the mic matters. Everyone agrees with that. It's the idea that there's big differences between speakers from the same lot independent of mic position relative to the cone that's controversial.

When you go look at the frequency response graphs from that video Dan posted, most of the paired speakers look like this:

You're not going to hear that.

The ones that do have a difference, it seems largely to be an efficiency difference like this:

If you normalized for volume, the vast majority of that would go away meaning they'd be functionally equivalent for recording.