Well, thanks! That's about as good a review as a mic can get, especially a $50 one!!! Definitely worth trying, I'd say!
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Not at all. The word "stereotype" means a fixed and oversimplified image of a large category of person or thing. "All Swedish people are tall" is a relatively inoffensive example of a stereotype. It cannot possibly be true, because there are both tall and short people in Sweden, just as in every other country. We have all heard equally stupid, but much more unpleasant stereotypes about various other categories of people.One stereotype fits the SM58, apparently.
The problem is the categorization itself: people are individuals, and have individual characteristics that are not dictated by their appearance, age, country of origin, et cetera. If I look at the clothes you wear, or the shape of your eyes, or the country you came from, and based only on that trivial fact, form an opinion about what sort of person you are, I'm stereotyping. There are light-skinned blonde Mexicans with blue eyes. There are Europeans with very dark skin. Not every Chinese person is good at math. And so on, and so forth.
Because an SM58 is one specific microphone, it is literally impossible to stereotype it - it isn't a category of things, it's one single thing! There is no category of things to label with the same stereotype.
It is possible to stereotype, say, the manufacturer of the SM58 - Shure Corp. You could say "All Shure microphones are horrible". But I said no such thing, and I wouldn't, because it's obviously not true.
In my posts in this thread, I provided facts about moving coil microphones as a category (increased moving mass), along with specific facts related to the SM58 (its frequency response curve), followed by links where you could hear recordings made with a different type of live-performance microphone yourself, and decide whether it sounded better than an SM58 or not.
In one or two places I stated my opinion, and in almost every one of those cases I specifically stated that this was my opinion, not an objective fact. Yes, I think the SM58 is a lousy microphone. A really lousy microphone. You may or may not share my opinion - that's entirely up to your ear/brain system.
Even better, borrow or rent one to try. They're like navels, everybody has one, so it should be relatively easy to borrow one from a musician friend. If you end up sharing my opinion of its sound quality, you will not be happy about having spent $100 USD on one, so better to form your opinion first, before you spend the money.
-Gnobuddy
A few tips: keep the microphone at least a few inches from your mouth when singing (no need to "eat the mic" like the SM58), don't let anyone blow directly into it to "test if it's live" (a blast of air might damage the thin Mylar film diaphragm), and don't let any drunken musicians pour beer over one!
-Gnobuddy
The SM58/57 is the all time reference. We understand that Gnobuddy doesn't like it, but that's a rather rare opinion.
Look on YouTube. There are 100s of videos comparing the SM58 or SM57 to all sorts of different mics. Put on good headphones and have a listen. Those videos might lead you to a microphone type that you do like. You might be surprised how similar many mics sound.
Mics are like screwdrivers. It's good to have a variety to fit a variety of needs. You'll have fn building and testing them.
Look on YouTube. There are 100s of videos comparing the SM58 or SM57 to all sorts of different mics. Put on good headphones and have a listen. Those videos might lead you to a microphone type that you do like. You might be surprised how similar many mics sound.
Mics are like screwdrivers. It's good to have a variety to fit a variety of needs. You'll have fn building and testing them.
Ha ha, that would be fun. . Of course the important thing for this thread isn't what mic is good or bad or medium, but a known standard reference. If you have a well known benchmark like the SM57/58 it allows you and others to know where you are in your mic experiments..
FWIW, I was forced to use Nady wireless on a long tour many, many years ago. The experience was so bad that I have not touched it since. Maybe they've gotten better.
. Of course the important thing for this thread isn't what mic is good or bad or medium, but a known standard reference. If you have a well known benchmark like the SM57/58 it allows you and others to know where you are in your mic experiments.. FWIW, I was forced to use Nady wireless on a long tour many, many years ago. The experience was so bad that I have not touched it since. Maybe they've gotten better.
Look up reviews of the Nady on Amazon, etc. You'll usually find some reviews from people who have experience with the SM58, and have compared both.
-Gnobuddy
I did, and yes, it was!Ha ha, that would be fun.
Sometimes the known standard reference happens to be a lousy product.
The Windows operating system is a good example - it's still the most insecure operating system I've ever used, but most people have never used anything else, and don't realize how bad Windows is. In 1997 I met Windows for the first time after years of working on Solaris (Unix), and I was shocked at how bad Windows 95 was. It was a crude and unreliable toy compared to Unix, crashing a dozen times a day and prone to catching any number of nasty viruses. But the general public didn't know any better, and for good reason: there weren't many alternatives at the time.
The SM58 is another standard reference with feet of clay. It has some good qualities - its tough as nails and dependable. Unfortunately, it sounds awful with most vocalists. When it was released in 1966, there probably weren't many better alternatives. But that was 53 years ago.
The Yamaha NS-10 loudspeaker was another similar benchmark. It was designed as a cheap-n-nasty domestic speaker, but quite inexplicably, it became extremely popular as a monitor speaker in recording studios. Even those who loved the NS-10 found its treble was so harsh that it became routine to drape a length of toilet-paper over the front of the tweeter to make the treble bearable.
How did a cheap and nasty speaker become so popular in recording studios? Beats me.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Affordable wireless mics tend to be unreliable, which is why many musicians have scorned them for years. I have had AKG wireless mics fail on me, but that hardly means every AKG product is bad.
In case it was not understood: The SPC-25 isn't wireless.
In case it was also not understood: I don't have any personal investment in whether you like the SPC-25, or the SM58, or both, or neither.
-Gnobuddy
It is. That doesn't mean it's wrong, though.
I rarely use popularity as an indication of the worth of a product. Popular things aren't always good (Hitler was quite popular.) Good things aren't always popular (BeOS was far superior to same-era Windows in almost every way, but it died virtually unknown.) Taylor Swift is popular but can barely sing. Howie Day is a far better singer than Taylor Swift, but he never achieved anything close to her popularity. And so on.
Rather than basing my opinions on popularity, I try to base them on facts. In the case of the SM58, this mic always sounded bad to me, and when I saw the published frequency response, it became clear why it sounds so bad.
Did you listen to the recording of the Milk Carton Kids that I linked to earlier? Do you honestly believe that you've ever heard live vocals sound that good through an SM58?
Yes, good mics with a wide flat on-axis frequency response, and similar polar responses, will sound very similar to each other (but not to an SM58), especially outdoors.
Indoors, I find that mics with different polar responses can sound different, even if they have similar on-axis frequency response curves. The different polar responses cause them to pick up room reflections differently, and that can change the sound.
Turning to not-so-good mics, there are a lot of SM58 copies which have a similar "presence boost" engineered into them. Many of them also sound alike, with boomy bass and muffled top-octave treble, though many don't have the "shrieky" sound of an SM58, probably because they don't have a cluster of four or more poorly controlled diaphragm resonances.
Comparing an SM58 with a good mic, side-by-side, with all EQ set flat, with a good monitor speaker, and using a revealing sound source, is a very good exercise to try.
One semi-pro singer with a 50-year music career converted instantly from her old faithful Shure SM58 to a Nady SPC-25 after she tried the side-by-side comparison I set up at one of our jams. She was that shocked at how much better she sounded through the condenser mic.
It's not that the SPC-25 is the greatest mic in the world, far from it. Rather, it's that the SM58 is really quite a nasty-sounding mic, and it's not hard to improve on its sound.
I'm quite sure there are better mics in Shure's own product lineup. I'm also quite sure that plenty of people with good ears within Shure Corp. know that the SM58 is not a good-sounding mic for vocals. But Shure is certainly not about to kill the goose that's laid ten thousand golden eggs for them over a period of fifty-plus years.
-Gnobuddy
I read this story in a Mix magazine interview with a FOH engineer who was doing live mixing for Tom Petty. Tom had used an SM-57 as his vocal mic for decades and had resisted any suggestions for changing it. Don't know why he felt so loyal. But in one sound check someone put up a Neuman condensor made for live situations (a KMS-105 IIRC) and the backup vocalists said "Tom this is the first time we have been able to hear the words you are singing." So he changed some time in the last decade or so.
This apparently true story is offered as a little reinforcement for Gnobuddy, whose opinions I value greatly. I use SM-58s and 57s a lot and I have heard many dynamic mics (Audix and Electrovoice come to mind) that sound WAY better to my ears.
This apparently true story is offered as a little reinforcement for Gnobuddy, whose opinions I value greatly. I use SM-58s and 57s a lot and I have heard many dynamic mics (Audix and Electrovoice come to mind) that sound WAY better to my ears.
We get it, you don't like the SM58. 
It's horses for courses. Singers can be oddly carefree about what mic they sing into, even when it doesn't do them justice. As much as musicians spend on their instruments and accessories, it would be nice if singers spent a fraction of the time and care. Too many do not. I've lured a number way from the SM58 to other types or brands because they sound better. We even had to use an old EV kick drum mic with one lady, because it was the only thing that really worked on her voice.
Same for drums and other things. When the Shure Beta mics came out everyone was crazy about them for drums. Now it's fashionable not to like them. Criticizing a known industry standard makes you sound smart, cool and gives you road cred. Hopping on the latest trendy mic does the same. It will forever be that way.
But as a wise person in this thread said:
It's horses for courses. Singers can be oddly carefree about what mic they sing into, even when it doesn't do them justice. As much as musicians spend on their instruments and accessories, it would be nice if singers spent a fraction of the time and care. Too many do not. I've lured a number way from the SM58 to other types or brands because they sound better. We even had to use an old EV kick drum mic with one lady, because it was the only thing that really worked on her voice.
Same for drums and other things. When the Shure Beta mics came out everyone was crazy about them for drums. Now it's fashionable not to like them. Criticizing a known industry standard makes you sound smart, cool and gives you road cred. Hopping on the latest trendy mic does the same. It will forever be that way.
But as a wise person in this thread said:
Start building something.. You'll learn a lot. Buy or borrow some known mics for reference. Shure, Nady, EV, Rode, whateverz. Starting with a dynamic mic build will be easiest, but you'll probably move on to condensers quickly enough.
Ok, I've found this build project on YouTube that seems nice and easy (and inexpensive) to try for my first attempt. I'll probaly build it in a metal box first just to try it out.
I've just remembered that a friend was a sound engineer in a previous life and I'm sure he mentioned that he still has lots of bits and pieces lying around so he may have some mics too.
Decades ago, when Hi-Fi audio was still an actual research field, and large-scale listening tests were regularly conducted by large companies, statistical analysis turned up the surprising fact that musicians as a group were among those least likely to be able to detect flaws in Hi-Fi equipment!
It is thought that this is because musicians tend to get pulled into the music itself, rather than simply listening to the sound quality. They hear the melody, the harmony, the instrumentation, everything except the frequency response errors, the THD, and the other flaws that make or break audio equipment!
Obviously there are exceptions, but the general rule is that musicians are usually insensitive to flaws in audio equipment that non-musicians will notice.
-Gnobuddy
I go to at least one music jam virtually every week, and I've met quite a few amateur musicians over the years. And there are quite a few who don't notice major flaws in their sound equipment. Like the jam-organizer who was using a pair of old Yamaha speakers both of which had blown tweeters - the speakers were incredibly muffled and dull-sounding, as only the big 12" woofers were working. But he had never noticed!
Thank you for your kind comments, JayGunn!
-Gnobuddy
Cool! That actually looks very nice. I think you'll be very happy with it.
Please keep us updated on the project.For me, every couple of months (I use mine for maybe three-four hours a week.)
For my friend who has multiple performances and practices every week, maybe 15 hours a week, the battery lasts about three weeks. Since she performs for a paying audience, she replaces the battery as a precautionary measure, before it actually fails.
99% of the time I use my SPC-25 at jams with other musicians, so I tend to replace the battery only when the mic actually shows symptoms of needing a new battery (reduced sensitivity, and/or an increase in broad-band hiss.)
If you use an Energizer Ultimate Lithium AA cell, battery life will double or triple. (That is the only lithium AA cell I'm aware of that's compatible - it is a proprietary formulation that puts out 1.8 volts, rather than the 3.7 - 4.2 volts of most lithium batteries.)
The battery-only power is the one thing I don't like about the SPC-25. I wish this mic had the ability to be phantom-powered, but unfortunately, it doesn't.
Nady's website showed a couple of other handheld condenser mics in the same family (SPC-xx) that can be phantom powered. I have not found those mics for sale anywhere I've looked, and I don't know if they're currently being manufactured or not.
-Gnobuddy
I also found that the other Nady SPC microphones were hard to find; but it appears that microphones.com and B & H Photo may have them---the SPC-10 is a large diaphragm phantom-powered condenser mic @ ~$70; the SPC-15 ($40) and the SPC-20 ($60) are also phantom-powered, but I don't know how any of those compare to the 25.
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