Recording - October 2011 - 68

Electro-Voice RE320
Conclusion I like the mic. It’s very forward sounding, due to the presence peak. This is a good thing on a lead instrument, but can be a bad thing at times, and it is always easier to add a peak with eq than it is to remove one that is already there. The cool thing about the RE20 is that you can use it on so many other things as well. You can’t use this mic on quite as many things, but it’s still remarkably versatile. On kick it will do about as well as an RE20, but I don’t see buying this mic just for kick. I have always said that the RE20 is a good mic on any vocalist. It’s seldom the perfect mic for any vocalist, but it’s never going to give you a bad vocal track on any kind of voice from bass to soprano. This mic is not like that, but I’d still rather have this mic than an RE27N/D. If my budget allowed for it, I’d have both an RE20 and an RE320 in the closet, for the things each mic did well. This mic is about two thirds of the cost of an RE20, but it’s considerably more than two-thirds as good as an RE20, and I feel the RE320 is a good lower-cost introduction to the good things an Electro-Voice dynamic mic can bring to the table. Price: $500 More from: Electro-Voice, www.electro-voice.com Scott Dorsey (dorsey@recordingmag.com) is a recording engineer and avid fan of good mic design, living and working in Williamsburg, VA.

Stamler’s resistor trick (May 2006, and also available in Recording’s online Resource Library under “Do It Yourself”) on this mic. But this characteristic does make the RE320 a lot more apt to exaggerate differences between preamplifiers than the RE20 as a result. Also, the source impedance of the mic is different on the positive- and negativegoing legs with respect to ground, probably due to something in the internal equalization electronics. So if you connect this into an unbalanced input, the response may be changed. Might be better, might be worse. What’s inside? Unlike the RE20 and RE27N/D, the RE320 doesn’t come with a schematic on the datasheet, and looking inside tells me it does not appear to be designed for easy field-repair work like those mics are. There is an awful lot of electronic equalization in there; 6 capacitors and 5 inductors in various resonant networks on a little board. I tend to have religious objections to internal equalization networks, but what really counts are the sonic end results, which are quite good in this case. The microphone definitely is intended for easier and more rapid automated assembly, but that means there are some things that require pretty careful realignment if you disassemble it on the bench. It does appear to be similar to a slightly stripped-down

RE20 element but with very different magnets, and a very different voice coil as well. Likewise the acoustic labyrinth is a bit less sophisticated than the one in the RE20 and that may account for a little of the topend roughness on the response chart. One of the nice things about E-V in the past has been that E-V mics have had a lifetime warranty. You could get an RE20 that was 25 years old, send it in, and they’d fix it for free. In the past few years, following some management changes, they no longer do this. But it’s clear that this mic is still intended for relatively easy factory repair and with long-term support in mind. That’s a very important factor to my mind.

RECORDING OCTOBER 2011

http://www.electro-voice.com

Recording - October 2011

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