Recording - August 2010 - 23

and more room tone, the quality of the room tone remained good. It wasn’t as good as with some of the higher-end condenser mics, but it was better than with an old RCA 77DX. I used the A840 on acoustic guitar and it sounded good. Not a lot of bite on the strings, but a clean acoustic sound without losing all of the bite. On fiddle the A840 was very smooth but maintained a lot more of the bite on the strings than typical ribbon mics do. In the end, I decided to pull the A840 out and put an old Oktava ribbon in for this application; I wanted a more colored mic to kill some of the screech from being so close in on a fiddle... Likewise on mandolin, the A840 was too accurate on top and I wanted something to settle the topend clang down. On flute and recorder, the A840 was a great choice. It had a good and clean sound, without any shriek on the top end; the mellowing effect was pleasant and more subtle than with an older RCA design. It was present but not harsh. Same thing on concertina... it made for a very forward sound without exaggerting the noise of the keys. On vocals, the A840 didn’t make everyone who used it sound like Gary Owens (the classic deep-voiced radio announcer); it was more versatile than

that and handled a very wide range of vocals. It was a great choice on a soprano, mellowing on top without losing the top register. It did have a little bit of an odd constricted sound that made things a little more nasal, but it had much less of that than the R84 I had tried before. I would have liked to try the A840 on piano, which was one application where the earlier R84 had some midrange problems, but I never did get a chance to do that. (Well, I tried it on an upright piano that sounded awful, and got a recording that sounded like an upright piano that sounded awful. “This piano belongs in a church!” complained the performer. It’s all part of the music festival experience, so I don’t blame the mic...) It did fairly respectably as a drum overhead, and as a general room mic on a string section, although I will say that it didn’t do as well as the BK-11 or as the better condenser mics. I put this down to the off-axis response on the A840 not being quite as good as the on-axis response; in that regard it seems to be a whole lot better than a 77DX in figure-8 or a 44B, but not quite up to the standards of the BK-11. There is no shame in that, as the old RCA BK-11 is a very hard act to follow. As a PA mic, the A840 had quite good gain before feedback. A lot of

folks are afraid to use figure-8 microphones for PA because they are worried about pickup from the rear lobe. It can take some moving around to get things right, but the very deep null of the figure8 mic means you can set it to get far better monitor rejection than a conventional cardioid. When I used the A840 on a massed group of fiddle players, the gain before feedback was not as good as that of a BK-11 but better than that of a 77DX, probably for the same reason I mention above with room miking. Conclusion The A840 is promoted to be an R84 with added phantom powered electronics, but to my ears it sounded better than that; I did not hear much of the midrange issues that I heard with the R84. The added phantom-powered electronics do what they are supposed to do and they don’t get in the way, and the resulting mic has a very good and usable sound. Price: $1725 ($1552.50 street) More from: Audio Engineering Associates, www.ribbonmics.com. Scott Dorsey (dorsey@recordingmag.com) knows and loves ribbon mics.

http://www.ribbonmics.com http://www.bfd-eco.com http://www.bfd-eco.com http://www.fxpansion.us http://www.fxpansion.us

Recording - August 2010

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