Mic Shootout! MKH40 vs. MKH416 vs. NTG-3

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I had the opportunity yesterday to conduct a mic shootout with my friend, Geoff, at work. Here were the scenarios:

Rode NTG-3 vs. Sennheiser MKH416
Rode NTG-3 vs. Sennheiser MKH40

The MKH416 hails as the film industry standard shotgun mic on location so we wanted to put it to the test and compare it to my new Rode NTG-3. We had a MKH40 laying around so we put that to the test too. I might add that the MKH40 has really low self noise, but it is NOT a shotgun mic. It is a cardioid. It’s probably not ideal to use the MKH40 on an exterior shoot situation anyway.

Conditions:

- Recorded in a professional, isolated VO booth
- The mics were on the same axis at the same height and pointed directly at my mouth
- The diaphragms were approximately 0.5 inches to 1 inch away from each other
- No pop filter was used
- All mics were running through an Apogee Trak 2 preamp
- The amount of gain was determined by our ability to match the volume of the mics going into Pro Tools
- The two separate signals went out of the Apogee Trak 2 digitally via AES into a Pro Tools 192 I/O into a 96kHz 24 bit session
- No processing/EQ/compression was used at all
- All files on Soundcloud and in the downloadable ZIP below were set to unity gain (exported files as regions)
- What you hear is what you get

I’ll let you decide and make your own decisions. Please feel free to leave comments with any questions or any thoughts about the shootout. My decision has already been made

Disclaimer: I am not a VO talent. No where close. Please excuse the read.

For those audio purists out there who want to hear the real .wav files (96kHz @ 24bit), I have provided a link to download the ZIP below. I think Soundcloud’s “transcoding” process does degrade the audio quality a bit so it’s always nice to have the real deal around. I just like Soundcloud’s player a lot better…

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE ZIP