At what point does the law of diminishing returns kick in for microphones?
I’ve been thinking about and researching this for quite a while.
I’ve been building out my home studio slowly for many years. Over the last year or two I’ve been researching more and more about mics for my home studio mic locker. I do extensive research before buying anything, I don’t have money or time to waste on gear and I want to make sure it’s the right thing at the right price. If I can get professional quality at a lower price, that’s what I want to do.
As I’ve been reading articles, forums and watching YouTube videos, I’ve noticed some common themes among the less salesy gear reviewers, and I thought I would pass that information along, in case you’re thinking of putting a few thousand down on a Neuman u87 thinking it’s going to get you good recordings.
When it comes to buying microphones what actually matters? What are the things that make the difference? Is there some kind of rule of diminishing returns where a drastic increase in mic price doesn’t result in an equal increase in recording quality?
During my research, here are the things that I’ve found the most, and what I’ve noticed in my own recordings as well.
Acoustic Treatment Matters More Than Mic Price
Take an expensive mic and plop it in a bad sounding room, and voila you have yourself an expensive recording that sounds like a budget one!
It will come as a shock to (I hope) no one, but mics just record sound. If the sound in that room isn’t flattering, no amount of money spent on microphones will make that room sound any better. There are ways you can use that mic to minimize the amount of room you hear when you press record, but the price of the mic isn’t going to make your room sound any better.
Look at any recording forum, any beginner home studio article or video out there and they’ll all say the same thing: treat your room first. This goes for recording, mixing, mastering, everything!
But what does that mean? How does one “treat the room”?
The simplest answer is to put things on your walls and ceilings that absorb sound. If you’re on a budget start with furniture, thick blankets (or quilts, if that fits your vibe), or cheaper acoustic foam panels. These are all common starting points for folks on a budget. Most of my acoustic treatment I either got for cheap off of Amazon, or I bought used from my local classifieds. Then, if your budget allows, start looking at what’s called broadband acoustic treatment and bass traps.
This doesn’t have to be prohibitivly expensive (but it very easily can be). You can start with cheap sound treatment, just know that if you stick with recording you’ll end up upgrading eventually.
There isn’t a room out there that can’t be benefitted from a little bit of acoustic treatment, so if you want your mics to sound better, make your room sound better first.
There are a few principles that I’ve noticed and taken to heart that have helped me save money and get better results: Corners are where bass frequencies build up and cause problems (bass fequencies are the hardest to treat for), treat them with thick sound absorbers, it helps tremendously
A few thick sound panels on the wall will do so much more for your room than lots of thin foam panels everywhere Thin panels only help tame the highest of frequencies. They can be helpful, but don’t count on them making your room sound awesome
Getting a good sounding room matters so much more than the price of your microphone. There are a number of amazing recordings that were all done with relatively inexpensive mics (Shure SM57s cost $99 and a lot of stuff is recorded with them).
Before taking the plunge on an expensive mic, take a look at your room. The more time and effort put into making your space sound awesome, the less money you’ll spend on gear trying to compensate for the room.
Price Doesn’t Tell You How it Will Sound in Your Room
This next principle may seem like a reiteration of the previous one, but it’s different enough that I think it deserves to stand on its own.
A bad sounding room will sound bad no matter what mic you put in it. But also, even in a treated room, an expensive mic won’t necessarily sound any better than any other mic.
You see, professional recording studios spend hundreds of thousands (if not millions) on professional acoustic isolation and treatment to make sure that every room sounds amazing. They make sure that the room is never an issue when it comes to getting good recordings.
But also professional recording engineers don’t necessarily use expensive mics to make their recordings sound “better”. It’s not even a secret at this point. Fancy mics do not necessarily make or break a recording.
Smart recording engineers are all about using the right tool for the job. If the instrument or singer that they’re recording sounds better with a $100 mic, that’s what they’ll use. Recording studios buy mics for their sonic “flavor”. A $3000 tube microphone has a different sonic character than a $200 dynamic mic. This doesn’t mean it’s better, but sonically different. They don’t get the $3000 mic to make their recordings sound better (necessarily), but to make sure that they have the right mic for the right application. Some voices or instrument will sound better with an expensive mic, but not all of them.
Every voice, instrument, band, genre, and song requires some thought to make sure that you’re using the mic that complements the sound that the artist is going for. You buy more mics to give you sonic options to choose from, not because expensive === good. When you don’t have to worry about the room sound, you use mics like a painter uses paints: you mix and match to fit the creation you’re trying to create.
But you know what else? Plop an expensive mic in your home studio next to an inexpensive one and do a blind test recording, and you might actually find that you prefer the cheap one. You might prefer the expensive one, but is it worth thousands of dollars just to find out you’d rather use the cheap one?
Each room is different, each mic is different, and each application is different. Additionally, us home studio folks don’t have unlimited budgets to buy huge mic lockers, so sometimes (for us) it’s better to have a locker full of budget and midrange mics than it is to have a few really expensive mics that don’t sound any better in our rooms than a budget one.
Listeners Won’t Know or Care What Mic You Used
Let’s be even more real here (as if the previous points weren’t real enough). You know who cares what mics you use? Almost nobody. Fellow recording enthusiasts and internet critics maybe, possibly a high maintenance client, or particularly discerning listener. You know who doesn’t care what mics you used? Pretty much everyone else.
Nobody cares if you used a $30 dynamic mic, a $200 condenser, a $10,000 custom-built tube mic, or a vintage ribbon mic from the 40s. If the recording sounds good, nobody in the whole world is going to know or care.
You know what else none of your listeners care about? How many mics you used.
There are a lot of great recordings throughout the 40’s, 50’s and even 60’s that were recorded using a single ribbon microphone because that’s all that they could technically do. The technology to do multitrack recordings either wasn’t there or was so new that it wasn’t widely used. So engineers did what anyone with limitations did: they improvised and experimented until they found a good sound.
In my opinion, that can be so much better than having every mic available to you. Having some limitations forces you to improvise and figure out how to make the most of what you have, it also forces you learn the gear you have. If you can make a budget mic in a cheap home studio sound good, you’ll be able to do a lot more with a pricey mic in a nicer studio.
So long as you’re producing quality content, nobody that actually matters cares.
Price Only Matters When You’re Trying to Impress Someone
After all of that has been said, sometimes impressing someone is exactly what you need to do. Sometimes having the expensive stuff is necessary.
There are some high profile clinets who won’t think about recording with you unless you’ve got the gear. It’s an expectation in the professional recording world that studios have a lot of different mics of all kinds of price points. They need to be ready to record all kinds of artists and genres and they need all the tools available to them.
But I’m guessing if you’re reading this you’re not in that camp. You’re more like me; a musician slowly turning a spare room, basement or garage into a studio.
There are so many things to consider and learn and buy! And having the expensive stuff for us home studio folks is really overkill or just for bragging rights. And maybe those bragging rights will lead to more clients, and maybe they won’t. Clients who know about mics will see that we’re rocking that Neuman and maybe they’ll consider us more professional or serious because of it, but I would hazard a guess that most people will just listen to what we’ve produced, and if they like it, probably won’t care what it was recorded with.
Our work should be what’s impressive, not our collection of gear. Because even professional studios don’t necessarily buy the gear for the bragging rights, but buy it so that they can have all the tools available to them.
How Much Should I Spend?
Where does the law of diminishing returns begin with microphones? How much should us budget-conscious studio owners spend? There is definitely a law of diminshing returns for us home studio people. There is a point where the more money you spend isn’t necessarily going to produce results commensurate with the price.
Unfortunately that price point is different for different types of mics.
There are really 3 main types of mics that end up in every studio eventually: dynamic mics, condenser mics, and ribbon mics. What each of those mics are, and what makes the unique is a bit beyond what I want to do with this article and we won’t even talk about ribbons because they have become kind of a niche studio item that eventually you might want, but if you’re in the position to want a ribbon you probably already know enough about mics to evaluate what your studio needs, so we’ll just stick to pricing for now for dynamics and condensers.
Dynamic
The mic in this category that absolutely dominates the conversation for live and studio work is the Shure SM57 (or SM58, which are almost the same mic, just the 58 has a pop filter on it). Every studio, every sound company or touring act has some SM57s and 58s on hand. They sound good, reject feedback pretty well, and are virtually indestructable. What’s even better, they cost $100 brand new. So, that’s about your starting point for dynamic mics. You can find some quality mics for less, if you’re on a really tight budget, but if you’ve got $100 to spend, ask pretty much anyone and they’ll tell you to start here. Also, almost every mic manufacturer makes their own SM57/58 alternative, you really can’t go wrong with most of them.
From there the price of mics can go up quite a bit, but I would say that once you get past $500 it’s no longer worth it. For that kind of money you can get the Shure SM7B (or SM7db), which nearly every podcaster and streamer uses (Michael Jackson used the SM7 on Thriller), or something equivelent. Once you go north of there, I just don’t think you’re getting enough mic to make the extra cost worth it.
So for Dymamic mics, your sweet spot is $100-$200. After that, I wouldn’t spend more than $500 on a dynamic mic.
Condenser
Condenser mics have a much bigger span. These are a lot more common in studios than in live situations, but are still use everywhere for different reasons.
Condenser mics come in different sizes and flavors. There are small, medium and large diaphragm condensers that all have their pros and cons. There are regular and tube consenders, each with their own advantages and uses.
Each kind of condenser has a slightly different price range, but we’ll talk about generalities here, because I really just want to dive into the minimums and the maximums for us budget studio guys.
For condensers you can actually get some pretty solid budget gear. There are brands like MXL, Behringer, AKG, Rode, Golden Age Project and others that produce fairly high quality mics at a really budget price that can give you really good results.
Take the Behringer C-2 condenser mics as an example. They come as a pair of pencil mics for about $60 ($30 per mic), and they are well-liked and well-reviewed by many people on every platform I’ve looked. Everyone seems genuinely pleased with the price-to-performance ratio of these mics. I don’t own any, but I would totally buy them without hesitation if I needed a pair of cheap travel mics for something or wanted an extra pair around the studio.
You can look at MXL as well. I own an MXL mic kit, first mics I ever bought that I got a as a package deal discount for around $100. Even though I have more expensive mics now, I still use them, and they sound really great for what I paid for them.
Based on my research and based on what I’ve noticed with my own mics, I would say that the sweet spot for budget condenser mics is $100–300. This is the point where you’re getting the most bang for your buck. There are so many amazing and well-loved mics in this price range you almost can’t go wrong.
Some examples in this price range: Rode NT1, Audio-Technica AT2020 and AT4040, Rode M5, Warm Audio WA-47Jr, sE Electronics sE7 (which I own, love them), Lewitt LCT 440 PURE, Aston Microphones Origin (I also own this one).
The list goes on. Many of these microphones you will see in professional and hobby studios everywhere. They are ubiquitiously used because they are legitimately good for a lot of different applications, and they don’t cost an arm and a leg.
But what’s the upper price range before you start hitting your diminishing returns in this category?
I thought it would be harder to find a price range here, but I think that number is probably around $1500 for a microphone (or stereo pair of small diaphragms). Once you get north of $500 you start getting some seriously amazing microphones, and get into the $800–1500 range and you’ll start seeing a lot of the mainstay mics in the professional recording world: a lot of Warm Audio is in this range, a number of popular budget (for them) Neuman mics, Universal Audio Sphere series, the famous AKG C214 and C414, Lauten Audio, Austrian Audio, Soyuz, Telefunken, Mojave.
All the big names in professional studio micrphones have very popular mics in this price range that will sound absolutely amazing. But start pushing past that $1500 mark and the price tag is most likely significantly higher than the increase in quality over any of the other mics in that $1500 price range.
Is your $4000 Neuman U87 going to make your stuff sound $2500 better? Probably not. But jumping from a $200 mic to a $1000 mic might actually make enough difference to be worth it for some studio owners (assuming you’ve treated your recording rooms well).
Summary
So, there you have it! Hopefully this helps put some things into perspective and hopefully helps anyone looking to start that journey into recording know that you can get a lot of value for a lot less money than you might have thought.
I realize that this is not the advice that most of us want to hear. I would love to buy the highest quality gear and know that it gave me an edge, but that’s because I enjoy buying gear!
In the end, it’s not the gear that makes for a successful studio, it’s the skillfull use of that equipment that leads to success. Skill and practice on entry-level and midrange gear (in my humble opinion) is going to be better in the long-run than just buying high-end gear without knowing why we’re buying it, or buying it because it’s a new shiny toy.
I love buying new shiny toys, but I (and I think many others) need to hear once in a while that we don’t need that stuff to get good at recording.
If you know your room, and know your recording needs and those needs include an expensive mic, then by all means buy it! Don’t let me stop you.
But I would hazzard a guess that the majority of people in the home studio world (myself included) won’t benefit from expensive mics enough to make it worth the cost. So hopefully that’s helpful to you in making purchasing decisions, or at the very least is a voice of reason coming from the internet ether, saying “you don’t need that microphone!”.
Someone other than our spouses should say it once in a while, I figure it would be me this time.