Five Cardioid Boom Microphones for Indoor Dialogue Compared
One of the best choices for recording indoor dialogue for film and video is a super-cardioid small diaphragm condenser microphone. I did some testing a couple of years ago comparing several and finally settled on the Audio Technica AT4053b, an approximately $600 USD hyper-cardioid microphone which has worked out very well for my projects.
Super-cardioid microphones tend to work very well when recording dialogue for video indoors in reverberant rooms (echo), because they have a more natural response to sound that comes from off-axis. This is not the case with shotgun microphones.
However, many have asked whether there are any more affordable options. In this episode, we compare five indoor dialogue microphones to help you get a sense for some of the differences ranging from about $100 USD up through $600 USD.
We didn't have time in the video to also include samples of the five microphones recorded into a more affordable recorder like the Tascam DR-60DmkII. And we also wanted to include the audio in its full glory in .wav format, pretty much straight out of the recorder and normalized to -23 LUFS for comparison. So here they are:
Tascam DR-60DmkII and Sound Devices 633 samples: