That's not my experience. The SM58 I have is far better in everything but price. My XM8500 sounds like it's been wrapped in a blanket, terrible high end to it.

@@wayneholmes637 it might be faulty or the low mids are masking the highs, just cut a decent amount of low mids and it should sound fine

Same. Indistinguishable listening on a phone speaker. Listening on my budget studio monitors I think I could detect a very slightly more 'sizzly' sound on the XM8500, which must be the highs Julian mentioned.

since JK doesnt answere: Could you briefly explain which EQ to use and how settings are applied?

@@123maines Did you figure it out?

@@123maines You need a parametric equalizer with at least 5 bands. For each band, you set a center frequency, a band width (Q factor), and an amount to boost or cut (the center of) that band. Any good parametric EQ plugin should let you do that, just plugging in the numbers from the video (onscreen starting around 7:07).

How close is it to the sm58?

You're right, but you wouldn't be handling the SM7B anyway.

@@honeste6652 it's designed to be handled and on an articulated arm mounted on a desk and you just grab it and reposition when you wanna sit in a different way or juggle records or tapes. On many podcasts, the occasional creaking and squeaking you hear; that's those articulated mic arms.

Pickup pattern and proximity effect vary and are more effective/useful on fancy mics. Sometimes distortion, noise, shielding, handling noise, max SPL and output is better on expensive mics. The SM7b has a lovely pickup pattern but you really need a decent preamp to make it shine.

You can capture the frequency response using simple equipment and REW (Room EQ Wizard), which is free software. The basic trick for medium and upper frequencies is to put the mic up on a stand where it's several feet from any surface, and play a chirp (fast frequency sweep) on a speaker near the mic. For the medium and high frequencies, the direct signal will be recorded before any reflections can bounce off of surfaces and hit the mic (which takes several milliseconds due to the speed of sound being about 1 foot per millisecond). For low frequencies getting clean measurements is harder because you need either a very large space or an anechoic chamber for that trick to work at long wavelengths. For relative measurements of two mics that isn't generally necessary (you can let reflections mess up the results somewhat, but similarly for both mics so that comparisons still work. If you need cleaner results for low frequencies you can do it outdoors "in half space" with the speaker sitting on the ground in a large, flat area like a parking lot. For low frequencies the direct sound from the speaker and the sound reflected off the ground just below it will be almost identical, and not mess up the measurements. If you want to make precise, objective measurements, rather than just looking for differences between mics, you need a measurement mic with a precisely known frequency response. You can buy a calibrated measurement microphone, which comes with a file telling you its sensitivity at different frequencies (and maybe different angles). You can use that in REW to adjust the results for a microphone you're testing, to factor out the non-flatness of the speaker etc. response.

Yes, you have a low frequency roll-off and a high frequency boost filter with the SM7B. Both were set to off for the test as this is how the SM7B is mostly used.

You didn't ask me but I'll give my opinion: Things like off-axis response, off-axis distortion, pickup pattern (which will vary even between microphones that have nominally the same pattern) and so on are baked into the microphone and will make exact matching between two mic designs extremely hard or just impossible, especially when jumping between different mic types, eg a fig 8 ribbon and a shotgun mic. However, you could probably make a mic sound CLOSE ENOUGH to a different mic, especially if they're broadly similar in design, eg two cardioid dynamics, as in this video.

A microphone's frequency response depends on the direction of the source, this is something you can't replicate with filters. So in principle, with EQ you can only match a mic's frequency response from a given direction to another mic's freq response from another given direction. There's also the fact that filters themselves introduce phase differences. Basically, the more similar a couple of mics are the better you can approximate each other with eq alone. That being said, If you want to imitate a target mic I don't think having a flat frequency response would give an edge to a source mic in this regard, it would be best to just pick whichever mic behaves the most similar to said target mic.

@@enriquekahn9405 Thanks for sharing your insights. It's useful to be reminded of other factors that contribute to the unique performance of Mics. 👍

@@HelliOnurb Good points. Thanks

Actually there is the slate mod mic check it out!!!

So, you likely remember Willy K ? I surely miss his voice and guitar, I played with him in S.F, way back in the 90s..

@@MrStephanbrun of course. Big loss for contemporary Hawaiian music... Aloha!

If you're using IRs, I don't think you need to separately EQ. As I understand it, the speaker's frequency response is a function of its impulse response, and adjustments to emulate the desired IR will adjust frequencies as a matter of course.