How did I come up with the crazy idea of making a lot of test recordings? Read more about the beginning HERE.

The people who participate in the test recordings, are myself (Claes Holmerup), my fiancee (Christina Malmqvist) and the famous Sven Bornemark (creator of Virtual Guitarist, Groove Agent and Broomstick Bass) on acoustic guitar. The song in the vocal recordings, is "All I ask of You" and comes from the musical "Phantom of the Opera" - if someone doesn't recognize it... It was chosen because it contains both loud and quiet passages - and because it's a beautiful song ( ok - my singing maybe isn't the best, so listen to the original song if you don't believe me... ;) ).

All recordings have been made as close to the optimum as possible in the format 44.1kHz/32-bit Floating Point (yes - I've learnt that 24-bit might have been a better choise, but I don't want to change more than necessary...). I kept the WAV-format so that a conversion wouldn't risk compromising the result. The only processing which has been made, is that I've cut the beginning and end - and normalized to -0.1dB in Wavelab. Because the recordings were made at a high input level from the start - and were recorded in 32-bit FP, this normalizing has an extremely small (or maybe even none at all) degrading effect on the original recordings.

If you experience distorsion in the WAV-files, it's NOT because they are distorted (except in a few cases, but there are comments about those...), but rather that your player doesn't handle the 32-bit FP WAV files correctly, so if you get this problem, please upgrade your player or get another one - or use the MP3-files instead.

All MP3-files were converted from the original 32-bit FP WAV-files in Wavelab with Lame encoder to 320kbps resolution, so they are of very good quality too.

Things that are out of the ordinary, have also been marked in the file names, so where the Gibson guitar is used, the guitar recordings also have 'gibson' added in the file names. When there's no such marking, things are back to normal with the Martin D-35.
All the recordings have been marked with which batch they belong to, with a number first in the file name, so you can easily check in the list on this page, to see what equipment has been used.
When there are differences in equipment, there's also a recording made at the same time, with my own Blue Babybottle (made in Latvia), in order to have a reference for compairing with other recordings.

- and now over to the list of equipment:

Batch	Popfilter	Micpreamp	A/D-converter	Guitar	Female voice	Male voice	Receiver	Loudspeakers
1	Standard double layer nylon	RME ADI-96 Pro	RME ADI-96 Pro	Martin D-35	Christina	Claes	-	-
2	Standard double layer nylon	RME ADI-96 Pro	RME ADI-96 Pro	-	Christina	Claes	Pioneer VSX-808RDS	JBL LC-44
3	Standard double layer nylon	RME ADI-96 Pro	RME ADI-96 Pro	Martin D-35	Christina	Claes	Pioneer VSX-808RDS	JBL LC-44
4	Standard double layer nylon	RME ADI-96 Pro	RME ADI-96 Pro	Martin D-35	Christina	Claes	Pioneer VSX-808RDS	JBL LC-44
5	Standard double layer nylon	RME ADI-96 Pro	RME ADI-96 Pro	Martin D-35	Christina	Claes	Pioneer VSX-808RDS	JBL LC-44
6	Standard double layer nylon	RME ADI-96 Pro	RME ADI-96 Pro	Martin D-35	Christina	Claes	Pioneer VSX-808RDS	JBL LC-44
7	Standard double layer nylon	RME ADI-96 Pro	RME ADI-96 Pro	Gibson J-200	Christina	Claes	Pioneer VSX-808RDS	JBL LC-44
8	Standard double layer nylon	RME ADI-96 Pro	RME ADI-96 Pro	Martin D-35	Christina	Claes	Pioneer VSX-808RDS	JBL LC-44
9	Standard double layer nylon	RME ADI-96 Pro	RME ADI-96 Pro	Martin D-35	Christina	Claes	Pioneer VSX-808RDS	JBL LC-44
10	Standard double layer nylon	RME ADI-96 Pro	RME ADI-96 Pro	Martin D-35	Christina	Claes	Pioneer VSX-808RDS	JBL LC-44
11	P-110 from swedish Mikrofonen AB	Benchmark Pre420	Benchmark ADC1	Martin D-35	Christina	Claes	Denon AVR-3808	ADAM Classic ART Center
12	P-110 from swedish Mikrofonen AB	True Systems P-Solo	Benchmark ADC1	Martin D-35	Christina	Claes	Denon AVR-3808	ADAM Classic ART Center
13	P-110 from swedish Mikrofonen AB	True Systems P-Solo	Benchmark ADC1	Martin D-35	Christina	Claes	Denon AVR-3808	ADAM Classic ART Center

You can make a donation via PayPal if you wish to support my work with this site.
Any size of the donation is very much appreciated. :)

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In the beginning, there was sound...
Well, I originally came up with the idea because I wanted to check out the difference between combinations of preamps and microphones which I had myself at the time. I came to mention it in an Internet forum I frequent and someone asked me to publish my recording as a blind test, so people could make some guessing for fun - and I did just that.
This was so appreciated, that I decided to try to borrow a bunch of microphones and try to do compairing recordings for people to take part of and then, it's just rolled on...
The original blind test can be found HERE, if you're interested.

Please enjoy,
Claes