Eliciting the most prominent perceived differences between microphones

Abstract

The attributes contributing to the differences perceived between microphones (when auditioning recordings made with those microphones) are not clear from previous research. Consideration of technical specifications and expert opinions indicated that recording five programme items with eight studio and two MEMS microphones could allow determination of the attributes related to the most prominent inter-microphone differences. Pairwise listening comparisons between the resulting 50 recordings, followed by multi-dimensional scaling analysis, revealed up to five salient dimensions per programme item; seventeen corresponding pairs of recordings were selected exemplifying the differences across those dimensions. Direct elicitation and panel discussions on the seventeen pairs identified a hierarchy of 40 perceptual attributes. An attribute contribution experiment on the 31 lowest-level attributes in the hierarchy allowed them to be ordered by degree of contribution and showed brightness, harshness, and clarity to always contribute highly to perceived inter-microphone differences. This work enables the future development of objective models to predict these important attributes

Modelling the Microphone-Related Timbral Brightness of Recorded Signals

“…To provide a dataset on which to base a model, listener ratings of brightness must be obtained for stimuli recorded using a variety of microphones. The stimuli used for the collection of brightness ratings were those described in detail by the authors previously [2]; the stimulus creation method is summarised below.…”

“…Ten studio microphones were selected that weren't used in the generation of the training dataset and that varied in terms of their sensitivity, self-noise, transient response, distortion, diaphragm size, transduction type, directivity, and frequency response: Sony C800; AKG D12; Schoeps CMC-6U with 2H capsule; Countryman B3; Neumann U87 (cardioid); Royer R-121; Sony F730; DPA 4015; Sony ECM670; and Hebden HS 3000 (hypercardioid). Eight independent experts were then asked to suggest microphones representing each extreme of the scale for the perceptual attributes of brightness, noise level, harshness, clarity, and piercing (the five timbral attributes contributing most to perceptual differences between microphones [2]). Analysis of these responses led to the addition of the HS3000 (omnidirectional) and AKG C1000S microphones.…”

“…The timbre of a recorded sound will potentially be affected both by the sound source and by the choice of microphone used to record it. Previous work by the authors in [2] identified 31 perceptual attributes of recorded sound that can be affected by microphone choice. The largest impact of microphone choice was found to be on the brightness of the resulting recording.…”

Dynamic Range Compression and the Semantic Descriptor Aggressive

“…As a descriptor could relate to more than one compression technique, the respondents were instructed to rate the descriptor for as many techniques as they felt appropriate. The use of similarity matrices to look for associations between audio descriptors has been used in several previous studies [25][26][27][28].…”

A Multi-Angle, Multi-Distance Dataset of Microphone Impulse Responses

“…Culloo and Ronan [8] investigated the perceptual effect of microphone angle, specifically on electric guitar recordings, using angles of 0 • , 30 • , and 60 • . Timbral changes between microphones were investigated comprehensively by Pearce et al [9], who also ordered the observed timbral variations in terms of perceptual magnitude; in this study, microphones were used on-axis only. Ziegler et al [10] developed a method for interactive visualization of microphone directivity characteristics, using a 15 • angular resolution.…”