Product Myths

1. Ear canal earphones increase the risk of hearing damage.

   According to new paper studies, if a person everyday listens to 80Db of sounds/noise for more than 8 hrs, you are at risk of having permanent hearing damage, however, labor laws would require companies to provide ear protective equipments to workers exposed to sound levels of more than 80Db as an industry safety standard. Therefore, we don’t suggest people to use their MP3 player for 8 hours straight everyday.

   Also, according to CNN on Aug.18, 2006, a company called Cor Portunff made a study that if people use 80% of their MP3 players listen to music everyday, the likelihood of having permanent hearing damaged is high. However, if you only use 10%-50% volume level, then there is no risk of hearing damage.

   Ear canal earphones such as Shure sound isolation earphones would only require very low level of volume to be able to comfortably listen to music.

   In the Philippines, where it is very noisy, a person can listen to music more enjoyable because it prevents the majority of ambient sound to enter your ear.

2. In-ear earphones compared to traditional earphones can cause more damage.

   NO. On the other hand, ear canal earphones actually protect your ears more.

   High quality in-ear earphones isolate the majority of the ambient noise that we hear everyday. By decreasing that much noise levels, it would only require a person a fraction of the normal volume level used to listen to music comfortably.

3. A traditional earphone does not easily damage the ear.

   If traditional earphones are used in very noisy areas, the listener will not notice that they are already using an extremely high level of volume for listening to music. They would then easily increase the volume to above the safety standards. In fact, we usually see people listening to music very loudly on commuter and public vehicles where people beside them can actually hear the sound.

   In conclusion, any style of earphone, regardless of their design, if misused, can have adverse effects to a person’s health.

4. A louder microphone is a better microphone.

   Some microphones are more sensitive than others but microphone sensitivity is not inherently related to quality. Condenser microphones are more sensitive than dynamic microphones, but in most musical applications when a mic is placed very close to the sound source, the sensitivity of a microphone is not important. There's more than enough signal even from a less-sensitive microphone to give an adequate signal into a PA system. If the microphone is overly sensitive, it just means you have to dial in more attenuation on the mixer channel so you don't overload the mixer. If you've got a mic on a snare drum that's 10 dB more sensitive than another mic on the snare, you'll have to turn down the one that's more sensitive.

   Extra sensitivity is not related to the sound quality. In many cases, "hotter" is equated with louder. In the days when neodymium magnet microphones were introduced, it was a common demonstration technique to line up several microphones, connect them to a mixer and set each channel level the same. Each microphone was tested and when it came to the neodymium magnet microphone, it was noticeably louder because the structure was more efficient than the alnico types.

   Psycho-acoustically, listeners tend to equate louder with better and that's been a common sales technique used in selling stereo speakers. If one pair in a store demo is turned up a little louder than the others, customers tend to think they sound better or are better. It's the same with microphones. It's a loudness difference, not a quality difference.

5. Microphones always sound better in the store.

   It depends.

   An in-store demo of a microphone or any other acoustic product is greatly affected by the acoustic environment of a store. (That's why there are listening rooms.) If the store is noisy or quiet, if you're listening to the microphone through loudspeakers or headphones, all of those factors change the perceived sound of the microphone.

   A clever salesperson can set up a demo to favor a particular microphone or a loudspeaker. If you're evaluating products in the store yourself and can control what you're doing, you can normalize the levels and the EQ so that each microphone is getting into the system flat. Then, the only differences you'll hear are the tonal differences of each microphone.

   In-store demos are not really indicative of how the microphone will perform in real life. Ideally, you want to take a mic to a gig and use it in the environment you normally work in. Evaluate it that way.

   Most people test the mic in the store wearing headphones (or listening through loudspeakers) and saying "Test, one two … test, one two" into the microphone. Because the sound of your voice reaches your ears directly through bone conduction, what you're hearing is not just the sound of your voice through the headphones or loudspeakers, but the sound that is conducted internally.

   To hear what the microphone really sounds like, you need to record your voice speaking or singing a phrase and then listen to it in playback. You can compare several mics that way and listen to the recording right in the store, wearing your own sound-isolating earphones or headphones. That will give you the best idea of what the mic really sounds like.

6. There's no way to clean a mic.

   False.

   We're probably talking about vocal mics that take on a certain amount of bodily fluids during their normal life spans.

   The foam windscreen inside the grille absorbs most of the effluent that spews on microphones. If you want to clean that, you just remove the grille, wash it in warm soapy water, rinse it thoroughly in fresh water and let it air dry. That can be done many, many times before the foam disintegrates. But when that happens, you can just replace the grille. (Available at a nominal cost wherever Shure mics are sold.) We don't recommend spraying anything (like a disinfectant) on the grille.

   The cartridge is never really exposed to the kinds of things that might concern someone. Cleaning or replacing the grille pretty much restores the microphone to its original condition.

7. Blowing into or banging on a microphone will damage it.

   False.

   There's no risk of damaging a microphone in either of these ways. But those kinds of noises are sometimes a problem for the sound system if it's turned way up because those impulses can damage the loudspeakers. And either irritate or potentially damage the hearing of anyone in the room.

   A more appropriate way to test the mic is to talk into it or sing into it at whatever level you're using and let the sound engineer set the representative level.

8. Some microphones have better reach than other.

   False.

   Reach is not a specification of a microphone. Mic users have a concept of reach as the ability of a microphone to reach out and grab the desired sound in the midst of some ambient undesired noise conditions. They believe that some microphones can pick up from farther away than other microphones.

   The reality is that microphones do not reach out and grab the sound from a distance. They merely measure pressure variations right at the diaphragm itself. The microphone doesn't "know" anything about what is happening at any distance from itself. For this reason, if you try to characterize a microphone's "reach", it's almost completely dependent on the ambient acoustic conditions around the microphone.

   Here's an example: Take a microphone to the Super bowl on a Tuesday morning at 2AM in the middle of July. There's nobody there. They've turned off the air conditioning and it's a huge quiet box. You put your microphone at one side of the stadium and drop a nail on the concrete on the other side of the stadium. Yes, the microphone will pick up the sound of that nail a couple hundred yards away because there's no ambient noise. Go back on Super bowl Sunday in the middle of the fourth quarter when the opposing quarterback is lining up to call the play. Put your microphone down on one side of the stadium, clear out the beer vendors and drop the same ten-penny nail on the concrete. Can you hear the nail? What changed? Same mic, same nail, same concrete, same building. But the ambient noise level is now 100 decibels higher.

   The reach of the microphone, if you can even call it that, is mostly dependent on the ability of the microphone to pick up sound in the middle of all that noise. No microphone has a "reach" that is defined independent of ambient noise.

   The one specification of a microphone that loosely corresponds to the concept of reach is directionality or the microphone's polar pattern. The directional characteristic of a microphone describes how much sound it picks up from ambient sources compared to how much it picks up on-axis.

   The numbers are there, but they're not huge. The difference between how much ambient noise an omni-directional and a hypercardioid microphone will pick up in the same conditions is only about 6 dB. (The hypercardioid mic picks up 6 dB less ambient noise than an omni.) Because of the Inverse Square Law of Sound, if I double the distance between the sound source and the microphone, the level of the sound source drops by six decibels at this greater distance. The ambient noise stays the same. If an omni-directional microphone picks up a certain ratio of ambient noise to on-axis sound at one foot away from a sound source, then a hypercardioid microphone can be used at two feet from the sound source and still pick up that same ratio. This is NOT because the hypercardioid is more sensitive to the on-axis sound but because it is 6dB less sensitive to the ambient noise.

   In that sense, the hypercardioid has more "reach". But neither one will work at great distances in the presence of any significant background noise. They just measure little pressure variations right at the diaphragm.