Product: CAD CM217
Price Paid: UNKNOWN
Submitted
01/10/2008
at
04:10pm
by
Bob
Reviewer Background
:
Worked as a live sound engineer for over 9 years, and have been recording just about as long, mostly band demos and live albums. For my live work I have access to all kinds of pro-audio gear and a vast selection of industry suitable microphones, but for recording in my off time I use project-studio grade gear and upgrade piece by piece. For recording I use a firewire DAW and can record 16 tracks at a time, and I monitor my mixes on KRK RP5s.
Overall Rating
:
3
The CAD CM217 comes with the CAD Pro-7 7 piece drum microphone kit. It's a tiny cardioid condenser microphone with a high-pass and attenuator switch on the mic. We were in a bind one night and needed to record a local band's live show but didn't have our normal mics on hand. We borrowed the CAD mics from another band and gave it a shot. Needless to say, this line of CAD mics left me completely unimpressed.
We used the CM217s as overheads for the drums, placed fairly wide and high behind the drums, adjusted for phase. We weren't running tom mics that evening, so we were aiming to get an overall kit sound and capture enough of the toms as well as the cymbals. The drummer was a massively loud player, so we engaged both the -10dB switch and the rolloff, set our mic preamp levels so we had plenty of headroom and recorded the show.
Afterwards, I was horrified to find that the CM217s could not take the SPLs of the drums. The overhead tracks were completely worthless and horribly distorted. Even though we had plenty of headroom at the mic preamps and both switches on the mic were engaged, the CM217s just crumbled under the pressure. I'd love to comment on the frequency response of these mics, but it's impossible to tell what the mics picked up behind all the distortion.
It's possible these mics might work for quieter drummers or acoustic instruments when quality and frequency response aren't paramount, but I wouldn't recommend these mics for any serious applications.
I've added a streaming preview of what these mics sounded like on the drums if you care to sample the heresy for yourself:
http://www.chittproductions.com/2008/01/guerrilla-recording-el-cheapo-mic.html
