[Music]

In this entire episode, you're hearing the JZ Microphones Vintage 11.

We'll just call it the V11 going forward.

It's about 15 centimeters from my mouth right here, and it's going into a SoundDevices MixPre 3 recorder.

Now, my perspective is, I'm coming from the spoken word recording point of view.

If you’re a musician, there are lots of other reviews out there from other musicians.

You might want to check those out, but here's our take on it from a spoken word point of view.

First up, let's get you some audio samples relative to other microphones. [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio] [Sample audio]

Now, I'll let you be the judge of which of those sounded best to you.

I think they're pretty close. I actually prefer the JZ V11 on my voice.

I think on Dani's voice, there's a little bit...

You could go a lot of different directions. But on my voice,

I preferred the JZ V11 the most, even more than the Neumann U87– I know some people are going to maybe disagree.

That's okay, everyone hears a little bit differently.

But what I will say is that none of these microphones are lacking in terms of how they pick up sound at various frequencies.

You could EQ any of them and get a great sound in the end, but just straight out of the microphone, I really prefer the V11.

First, we have a variety of different samples I want you to hear.

Let's jump into that. First up, a sibilance sample.

Sibilance is the sound you hear when someone says the letter S or C.

Some microphones really emphasize that, others not as much.

Here's how it sounds with my rather sibilant voice.

She sells seashells by the seashore; by the seashore, she sells seashells.

For all of these tests, we're about, I would say, 20 centimeters, maybe 15 to 20 centimeters away from the microphone.

Next up is plosives, we don't have any sort of plosive filter in front of us here, just the grille. I'm going to go ahead and face the microphone, again, somewhere between 15 and 20 centimeters.

And this is what it sounds like: Peter Piper picked a peck of purple pickled peppers.

Peter Piper picked a peck of purple pickled peppers.

Peter Piper picked a peck of purple pickled peppers.

Whoa… [laughs] Peter Piper picked a peck of purple pickled peppers.

Here's a recording of the proximity effect. I'm probably I would say 3 centimeters from the front of the microphone right now.

Lots of mouth noise too. Yuck. Let's go ahead and bump the stand just to see how well this shock mount manages any sort of vibration and making sure that it doesn't pick up a lot of that.

And then the microphone itself.

Seems like there's plenty of that going on.

Next up, let's go ahead and give you a sense for the off-axis coloration of the microphone.

When you talk, and when sound comes from different sides of the microphone, again, this has a cardioid polar pattern. So it should reject most of the sound from the back, but it can also reject some frequencies more than others.

And so sometimes you get coloration. Let's see how this sounds.

And generally, what you're looking for is something that sounds pretty natural off-axis– quieter, and picks up less sound, but doesn't color it in any way.

In other words, it doesn't still pick up some frequencies and reject others.

Here's how it sounds. So here is at 90 degrees off-axis from the microphone.

So I'm talking into the side of microphone. And then here's at 180 degrees.

I'm talking into the back of the microphone.

Bringing it back to the front at 0 degrees, so I'm right on axis, 90 degrees off axis, 180 degrees, so I'm talking into the back, 90 degrees, and then 0 degrees, directly into the microphone.

Again, here I'm between 15 and… about 15 centimeters from the front of the microphone.

Let me back off about a meter. Here's approximately 1 meter away from the microphone.

So typically, you know, obviously, the sweet spot's gonna be closer.

Somewhere here in the maybe 10 to 15 to 20 centimeters range.

Alright, running through the pros and cons from my point of view.

First of all, the V11: fantastic sound for spoken word audio, especially for sibilant voices. It manages the sibilance nicely.

It has a very warm sound, but also the rest of the frequency response– so, by warm

I mean kind of… a little bit more of a boost in the low frequency, so you get kind of that broadcast sound. But then it's pretty even through the rest of the spectrum.

And so for people with voices like mine that have a lot of sibilance, the sizzling S sound, this handles that pretty nicely.

So I think it works really nicely on sibilant voices and kind of more neutral voices.

If you have a really, really deep voice with not a lot of high frequency energy, not a lot of sibilance or anything beyond that, there are probably other better choices. The self noise performance is excellent.

They cite -6 dB A-weighted. We did a practical noise floor sample, again, just recording in this very quiet space here.

Turn off all the lights, turn everything off, except for the microphone and the recorder. Record about 10 seconds of spoken word dialogue and then silence for 10 seconds.

Bring that into a digital audio workstation, boost everything to -23 LUFS, and then we measure the silent portion.

And that sat at -75 dB RMS max when you apply a 65 hertz low cut filter.

So from my point of view, excellent performance.

I don't think they're lying about that spec of -6.5 dBA self noise. So it's not going to be the microphone that's making all the noise.

If you're having noise issues, it's gonna be that there's noise in your room.

The directional pick up cardioid means it's, of course, going to be most sensitive on the front, least sensitive on the back, and it kind of falls off on the sides.

Overall, I didn't find the off-axis sound to be colored really a whole lot.

So really nice even response around the microphone.

What that means in practical terms is you just get a really nice sound and anything– any reflected sound is just going to sound quieter, not colored in a weird way.

It does include this really low profile shock mount.

And I would say that's a plus and a minus.

It doesn't do super well when it comes to stand bumps.

You notice that some of that energy transfered.

It's not the worst I've heard. It's not the best I've heard.

So the shock mount is okay. I think the assumption is you're gonna be careful and not bump your stand, or your desk if you're putting it on a desk stand.

So that's just one thing to keep in mind. But it is really nice for musicians if you want to record, for example, a guitar amp cabinet or something like that, you have this really low profile shock mount that makes it really easy to get the microphone right up against the speaker cones.

It does include a five year warranty and the price is $899 USD at the time of the review here.

Sometimes it actually goes on sale for less than that; substantially less than that. So it's a steal when those deals come around.

Now there are some things to note here, perhaps cons, or at least notes. Number 1: again, as I mentioned, the shock mount, okay, but it also has the plus side that it is very low profile.

Number 2, there are plenty of plosives here.

That is the sound that you get, the P, when someone says P or B directly into the microphone.

This definitely pops. So you're going to want to just use a pop filter or some good mic technique.

We're not using one here. I'm just talking just past the microphone

It's aimed at my mouth at a 45 degree angle.

That seems to be working fine. There's no sort of in-built high pass filter or pad.

So if you're looking for those, you'll just need to do that in your recorder or in your audio interface instead of in the microphone itself.

So not a huge deal, but something worth calling out.

So what makes this microphone special? Well, there are a few things.

Number 1, it's made in Latvia; designed and made in Latvia, as I understand it, assembled by hand.

So, they say handcrafted; seems really, really high quality in terms of its build and its overall fit and finish, so really some nice work there. They're also using what they call their Golden Drop technology on the capsule itself, so on the actual diaphragm. And so normally for large diaphragm condenser microphones, in fact, most condenser microphones, they have a gold sputtering on them. They actually, like Jackson Pollock, they throw little bits of gold that adhere to the membrane. In this case, they're using golden drops.

And the idea with that is that it makes it so that the diaphragm can actually move a little bit faster than heavier capsules. So that, in theory, gives you higher clarity or increased clarity and precision and reduces the coloration and distortion.

It’s a secret though– they don't tell you all the details about how that works.

To me, it just sounds good. Of course it has a fixed cardioid polar pattern, so it is picking up, again, mostly from the front, falls off at the sides and rejects most of the back.

They really kind of pitch it as a vintage-styled microphone, not just in terms of its body, but in terms of its sound.

And you definitely can hear there is an elevated boost in the bass frequencies, you can see from the frequency response pattern here.

They kind of pitch it as a good mic for vocals, for room mics, for grand pianos or for acoustic guitar.

Again, I don't know. We're not recording with those things, but it does use a Class A discreet amplifier circuit; transformerless, so they kept it really nice and clean in terms of the overall noise.

It is evidently an electrit microphone, if I'm reading the specs correctly.

They say electrostatic is its operating principle.

We could go on and on and have a debate about whether electrit microphones are good or not versus ‘true condensers’.

I just think this microphone sounds great and I've had several electrit microphones for decades and they're just– they're doing just fine.

Here are some other specs if you're interested. Again, signal to noise ratio, 87.5 dB A-weighted, output impedance 50 ohms, self noise of 6.5 dB A-weighted, and a max SPL of 134 dB, so you can run this up against guitar cabinets without a problem.

Of course, it requires 48 volt phantom power.

So let me give you my take. Overall, I think it's an excellent warm sounding microphone, but also sounds fairly balanced once you get past the low frequencies.

So it's a really great sound if you're looking for that rich, warm, yet still detailed sound.

So it really works nicely for spoken word audio, for podcasts, for live streams, for voice over, things of that nature. I think it handles sibilant voices better than a lot of other condenser microphones.

A lot of other condenser microphones have a boost in the higher frequencies, often right in the sibilant range, somewhere between 5 and 10 kilohertz.

This seems to manage that quite nicely.

Now, again, as I mentioned before, if you do have a very dark voice, lots of low– like a very low, dark voice with lots of low energy and very little high frequency energy, this is probably not the best fit for your voice.

But there are lots of other options out there. We demonstrated some of them and JZ

Microphones has a whole series of microphones with different voicings.

It's interesting on their website, you can go and see they actually have a kind of an array; they lay their microphones out on the bright to dark kind of scale. This is at the darker end of the scale, but really interesting to see how they actually present those.

I don't think there are a lot of other manufacturers that represent their mics that way.

Again, very little off-axis coloration, which is good, and also a couple of things to note: you probably need a pop filter or you need to use it in a fashion like this.

So if you're working with someone who's never really talked on a microphone before, you're probably going to want a pop filter for them.

If you have good microphone technique, you can do it without a pop filter just in terms of positioning.

Careful not to bump the stand. The shock mount helps some, but it is not foolproof, a hundred percent.

So you'll just wanna be careful about that for whatever your purposes are.

And overall, I really love the sound of this microphone on my voice.

We used it on our livestream last week, and listening back,

I was like, wow– I really, really like the sound of that microphone!

Now, that's not to say that any of the other microphones that we compared against couldn't be made to sound great with some equalization in post or even in real time if you're doing a live stream.

But if you're comparing the sounds directly out of the microphone, the JZ V11 sounded fantastic to me.

If you have any questions, go ahead and leave those down below.

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And we'll be sure to get you more great videos on how to improve your lighting and sound for video.

Talk to you soon.