Recording - October 2011 - 88

When I started out in the audio industry, studios had a lot of homebuilt equipment. It wasn’t unusual to see an Ampex tape machine hooked up to a completely custom mixing board, connected up to some homebuilt outboard processing. Back then, even stock equipment would often be customized in order to deal with problems as significant as unusual operating levels (lots of studios were set up for levels different than the +4 we expect today), or as trivial as moving the power cord so everything in the rack had the power cord on the left and they could all be wrapped up nicely.

done to the microphone in-house, and that these microphones were designed to sound as good as possible—stock. The buyer, however, insisted on having it modified, but he couldn’t explain why he wanted it modified, or what he expected to achieve from whatever modification he had done. There’s one fellow who was well-known for rebuilding condenser microphones; his secret modification used to consist of engraving his name on the backplate of the microphone. This totally changed the distortion characteristics of the mic in a way that made the mic much less neutral. But people bought it, because it was an exciting secret modification that made the mic sound different. There have been some people who have spent some time reverse-engineering various common audio modifications to find out what they are actually doing. One of the more interesting ones has been Robert Keeley’s modifications to the BOSS DS-1 guitar distortion pedals. Now, guitar electronics modifications are really interesting because they are done to color the sound differently on products that were already designed to color the sound. However, in a lot of cases nobody really has a good idea what these products are really doing—either before or after the modifications! One of the good things about Keeley’s pedal modifications is that he makes it very open and public what is being done to them. Consequently, two folks from the University of Texas at Austin, Matthew Schneiderman and Mark Sarisky, did a careful analysis on the distortion spectra of the

Guest editorial by Scott Dorsey

Everybody Wants To Modify Everything These Days
Back then folks would modify things to change the sound, but most of the modifications made to stock equipment tended to be to change functionality rather than sound. You’d tend to see things like changing connectors out so everything in the studio was wired the same way, or changing gain structures so everything in the studio had about the same clipping point. Those days have changed, but the urge to modify equipment remains. The thing is, a lot of people have started making modifications not because they want a particular functional or sonic change, but just because it’s fashionable and cool to have modified equipment... regardless of whether or not the modification in question makes any sense. A high-end microphone company owner of my acquaintance got a phone call from someone who wanted to buy one of his company’s $3000 condenser microphones so he could have it modified. The owner pointed out to the potential buyer that if there was something he really wanted done, he could have it
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pedals before and after the modifications, and made a serious attempt at characterizing what really was going on. This sheds a lot of light on what the modifications do, and it also shows how particular spectral changes translate into particular subjective sound changes... and that’s a big deal. They published their results, by the way, as AES Preprint 7791. Considering I actually still make some money selling parts for microphone modifications and sometimes can even convince the Editors of Recording to publish mic mod articles [...and they continue to be very popular with our readers, when we can find space for them!—those mean old Editors], I can’t say that the whole prospect of modifying commercial products is bad. But it is important to know why you’re modifying a given product, and to know what change you expect to get from the modification. Making things different to make them better is a worthwhile endeavor, but sometimes it can be tough to tell whether different truly is better. Objective data (less distortion, better S/N ratio) is good. Subjective results (“I did this mod and love how my old fuzzbox sounds now with my Strat”) are good. But mods for the sake of mods? I don’t think the process of making things different just to make them different is necessarily something worth spending a lot money on. Scott Dorsey (dorsey@recordingmag.com) modded an entire generation of inexpensive Chinese microphones in our January 2002 issue, and those mods are still very popular today. You can read the article for yourself at http://tinyurl.com/MakingMicsBetterDIY. Scott would like to think that in that particular case, different did indeed turn out to be better.

http://www.tinyurl.com/MakingMicsBetterDIY

Recording - October 2011

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