****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Amateur musician here. Music is a hobby that consumes enough of my allowance that I am likely to be cross at myself when I'm older, deaf, and living on insects due to insufficient retirement funds. But that's future-Me's problem.In the meantime, I play mediocre bass through hardware that I really don't deserve to own; record our band practices to a high-end laptop that I do deserve to own (I use it for work, so I can justify that), and play with expensive plugins to try and make my mediocre chops sound like well-recorded mediocre chops. Not quite there yet, but in time, maybe.We live in a good time, where even fairly cheap tools can deliver quality beyond what our parents' basement bands could ever dream of. I've found that learning to tune drums correctly will make far more difference than the right mic, or even the right mic position. (Finding a drummer that knows how to tune their own drums is even better.)That said, I have become a fan of Sennheiser. I never really cared for the Shure Beta 52A, which I also own. It always sounded band-limited and generally cruddy to me. EQ can do wonders, but if there's significant coloration, it won't ever sound as good as a better mic would. The E902 is a better mic. I brought this to practice, mounted it to a stand, poked it through the kick drum hole, picked up my guitar, and off we went. It sounded better immediately.Our monitoring system is all analog -- Presonus DigiMax mic pre-amps with analog line outputs to a Presonus ACP-88 compressor (for drums) and a couple dbx 166XLs (for vocals, bass, and guitar). From there, direct to a couple rackmount line mixers and into a headphone distribution system. No EQ. So, it's nice to have a usable sound without much signal processing.I also tap off the mic pre's via ADAT into a FireWire interface (remember those, kids?!) for capturing multi-track sessions. Then I get to spend some time auditioning solo tracks and pretending that I know what I'm doing with sophisticated DSP software. It's really more like someone let an ape sit in front of an SSL console, but with my little iPhone earbuds, it sounds pretty sweet.I'm also a fan of the E604 tom mics. They're so tiny and unobtrusive compared to a bunch of SM57s on stands, or those awkward drum mounts, and they sound quite nice as well. These really blew me away, and led me to buy the E902, and a D1 wireless mic set -- also awesome. I'm going to trade up from my Line 6 X2 to the D1 bodypack soon. (See what I mean? Future me is screwed.)My one complaint with this mic is the adjustable mount. It uses a standard Phillips screw with captive nut on the other side to lock it in place. You really need to keep a screwdriver handy to adjust it, and I've already rounded the head a little by using the wrong size driver. (It's all I had available). The Beta 52A has a nice chunky, solid, tool-less knob thingy. There really is no excuse for the cheap screw that Sennheiser used. But all in all, it's a fairly minor complaint -- IF you aren't moving things around much. If you use it live, you're going to need to deal with this sooner than later.
