DESCRIPTION:
Entering now into the third year of our partnership, in February of 2015, Mr. Robby Scharf --Key Accounts Manager of Sennheiser Electronic Corporation-- came to UCLA's Film Department to give a clinic to the Advanced Music Recording class on Neumann's Series-D microphone system. After an in depth conversation with the students about this cutting-edge technology and a live demonstration of what it could do, Mr. Scharf then loaned the students a Neumann Series-D Digital Microphone system for their class recording projects. This included: One TLM-103D Cardioid Microphone, a matched pair of KM-Ds (with interchangeable capsules for Omni, Cardioid and Super Cardioid), a DMI-2 to communicate via AES 42 to the Microphones and then directly to our Pro Tools HD system via AES/EBU, as well as a copy of the proprietary RCS software to control it all. Over the next several weeks the students were challenged to put the Series-D microphones up against their "personal favorites" that we have in our own mic locker (as many of those microphones are also partners with our program, they are not named here out of politeness). In all cases, the comparisons were made by putting the Series-D microphones as close as possible to the student's microphone of choice while recording. Afterwards, the recordings were volume matched and the students compared what they heard. While there were a few instances in which the students preferred their original microphone, it was largely an issue of taste of wanting a specific color rather than the pure sound captured by the digital mics. In other words, the students actually wanted a lower fidelity sound because that was what the production called for in the pop music aesthetic. Those rare exceptions aside, the students overwhelmingly recognized the superior sonic quality of Neumann's Digital microphones and you can clearly see that here.