Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/69535
review By LUKE HARPER Owner/Engineer Audio Altimeter Minneapolis www.audioaltimeter.com DPA MMC2011 mic & MMP-A preamp S o the day this mic showed up was an interesting one. I was at a photo studio, and next door was Silver Ant, a record- ing studio. So I called the owner, whom I'd never met, and said "Hey, I just got a rad Dan- ish mic in for a review. Do you have a kit set up?" He said, "I do. C'mon over." So I did, and threw this thing up as the lone This mic is profoundly honest. overhead. He did that drummer thing for a bit, and then we settled in to hear the results. "Dude, that mic is pretty cool," he said. "You can hear each piece of the kit, and they sound great." I mean, it was a damn fine-sounding kit, so cool. The mic could represent reality. Then we threw it on an acoustic he had lying around. "Wow. Not so much." So I fiddled with it. Moved it back and forth, up and down the neck… nada. Hmmm. (More on this later though.) Well, anyway, thanks very much to Silver Ant for letting some random dude walk in and do a thing. Hugely appreciated. TIMING IS EVERYTHING Twenty minutes after I walked back into the photo studio, my favorite director calls me. "Luke, I need you to post a 10-minute film for NAB in two weeks, so I actually need it in a week and it needs lots of Foley, and the sync is all shotguns so no lavs; we planned on you Foleying most of it anyway." I'm not terrible with punctuation — that's how he talks. "Neat, send me some stuff. Maybe a nice .omf." With that the game was on. I started putting materials together and mapping out a plan. Tremendous amounts of Foley. But hey, let's just try this DPA out for shiggles, right? I mean, it's just sitting there... Well, that turned out to be a pretty good move. This mic is profoundly, directly honest. Like, telling you that your haircut sucks honest. In front of your family on Christmas Day honest. So THAT'S why the guitar wouldn't work. It was just a studio beater… more of a keen looking prop than anything else. The DPA Don't ask it to lie for you! refused to polish it. I can appreciate that — we all have our tools that can purty up a source, but sometimes the source is so flaw- less that all you want is the unvarnished truth. And that's what this combination of capsule and preamplifier body yielded. DPA is an interesting company: they start- ed out as a division of B&K. Brüel & Kjaer makes high-end measurement products aimed purely toward the test and measure- ment markets. DPA was created as the music division — so, performance industries. In the mid '90s they merged with Muphone, a hearing-aid company. So reference quality with a keen eye toward precision/ reality became the ultimate focus. The 4000 silver-tipped series micro- phones retain the B&K capsules, while the black-tipped 2000 series are specifically DPA. SOME DETAILS I was using the MMC2011, which is a twin-diaphragm cardioid micro- phone capsule. The self-noise is neg- ligible and the gain required isn't overt. You aren't trying to play the S/N ratio game, and you aren't afraid of what your pre will do past point X. I had this paired with the MMP-A preamplifier body. On the preamp front, DPA gives you three options: the long-bodied MMP-A, the mid MMP-B and the MMP-C compact. The MMP-A has a -20dB pad, the MMP-B is super light, and has low cut and a high boost. The MMP-C is a very compact preamp with what DPA describes as "slightly softer char- acter." I couldn't really discern too much of a difference between the MMP-C and the MMP-A, frankly, so it seems like more of a form-factor issue. Having the option of swapping out capsules and preamps based on application is super convenient. Physi- cally, the execution is marvelous, too. There is a smooth precision to the brass machining that makes joining capsule to preamp a weirdly enjoy- able experience. Ostensibly, the MMC2011 is one of those pieces that classical kiddies like to have around, as overheads on parts of an orchestra, or the occa- sional grand piano. While it is cru- cially honest, somehow it isn't clini- www.postmagazine.com cal. I even had a bit of a time explaining this to myself. It's hard to quantify. For instance, as part of some Foley fun, I had to record various angles and speeds of a sewing machine. Plain mic-pre, nice quiet room, really nice sewing machine. The MMC2011 represented the machine as complicated, multi-faceted and very, very real. You could hear the individual components of the mechanism evenly represented. Set to pic- ture, the effect was gorgeous. EQ? I rolled it off a little under 120. That's it. So again to the point of brutally honest without being clinical — there is subtle char- acter, but that character seems to enhance the fundamentals, as opposed to highlighting the horror. You will have a really difficult time trying to use this mic on a flawed source. It won't scream them, but they will be wholly represented. On the other hand, your beauti- ful work of art instruments will have the fin- est in representation. FINAL THOUGHTS I like having a specific mental classification for all of my tools, as it keeps me efficient. While workhorses are great, having the exact tool for the exact job speeds everything up and generally yields superior results. This mic has a niche, and it doesn't take more than two usages to mentally define. It was absolutely superb for Foley, and easy to work with on the better instruments in my collection. Just don't ask it to lie for you. Post • June 2012 47 PRODUCT: DPA MMC2011 twin- diaphragm cardioid mic capsule, DPA MMP-A preamp WEBSITE: www.dpamicrophones.com PRICING: MMC2011, $475; MMP-A, $495 · Modular system · Truthy, yet not sterile · Amazingly versatile clip system VITAL STATS