“I’ve been using the Antares Mic Modeler for a while to make my C414 sound like other mics. I particularly like it on the M149 setting with just a bit of tube distortion thrown in. Recently a client brought an M149 into my studio and we began to play with trying to get the two mics to sound like each other, just for the heck of it. We never could. It seems like the claims of the Mic Modeler are a myth. What do you think? Oddly enough, I like the sound of the M149 modeled from my 414 better than the actual M149!”
Your inSync editor has also done this same experiment. First, I never took the claims made by Antares or anyone representing them to mean that it would make any microphone sound “exactly” like another microphone. There are too many subtle variables for this to be possible. It’s not easy to find two of any one mic model to sound the same, so right away you know there has to be at least that much of a margin of error in any processor trying to accomplish what the Mic Modeler does.
Microphones each have their own personality, and characteristic ways in which they react to their environments and circumstances. The Mic Modeler does an amazing job of approximating these elements. They have a parameter for distance from the microphone and some of the more obvious things, but they can’t know the exact characteristics of YOUR C414 or the M149 you had access to. All they had to go by were the ones they had when they developed the models. Therefore the models in the Mic Modeler can only be accurate to the extent of the mics they when developing the models. Thankfully C414’s are pretty consistent, other models will not fare as well.
But all of this distracts us from the real point of the Mic Modeler technology. Sure, it’s a great tool to give us close approximations of mics we’ll never be able to afford or even get our hands on. It allows us to have a mic closet of a hundred or more mics, with only the investment of a few. This is all great. But you’ve already found a sound using you mic modeler that you like better than either one of the “real” microphones in question. Sure, the ability to add some of that tube distortion is nice, but beyond that this is a tool that gives an engineer subtle ways to get great sounds that heretofore haven’t been possible. It just takes a lot of experimentation.
