CAD Equitek E100 Condenser Microphone

The e100 is an interesting little beast. With a street price of around $250, its definitely in the low range for large diaphragm condensers. It has some quirks to it, but I was able to get some good sounds out of this guy. Its a supercardiod condenser microphone... it's got handy switches on the front for power, bass rolloff, and 10db Pad. It powers from phantom or the included rechargeable batteries and is all in all a pretty durable mic that will stand up to a decent amount of abuse.

It has a pretty unique sound with a boost in its frequency response just above 5kHz that rolls off at the top of its frequency response at 18kHz. This gives the mic a little quirky sound like the mids have a hole in them. Used effectively, this can create some really cool sounds with the right cymbal/overhead situation. I've also gotten some great sounds on an acoustic guitar from this mic -- particularly getting lots of the detail of string noise and picking noise. Again, in this situation, it's not going to be right for every acoustic guitar situation you run into, but in certain situations, it's golden.

As a vocal mic, combined with the right combo of eq'ing and compression, this microphone is a powerful hitter at its price range. In most cases, I had to dial in the mids around 2-3kHz to really bring the voice to the front. Using this mic to record backup vocals when the lead was recorded with a more traditional sounding condenser yeilded some great results with little to no eq, the tracks just slipping right where I would put them in relation to the lead.

All in all, this is a pretty decent mic for a low end condenser. The important part is that you realize its strengths and weaknesses and compensate for them as needed. On an acoustic guitar, I often coupled this with anouther mic to catch the boomy low mids. For drum overheads, id make sure there was a room mic somewhere to get some of the washy middles. If you need to, you can pull off using this as your main large diaphragm condenser, as long as you're willing to do some creative doctoring now and then. In my experience, *most* large diaphragm condensers in this price range have some similar level of quirkiness. If you can spring for the extra couple hundred dollars, you can get a totally solid mic like the AT4050 (review coming soon), but if its not in the budget, this mic will do you pretty well.