AEA Listening Room

Often times, a audio engineer will hold off on buying a microphone until they know how it sounds and have seen reviews on that. Well, AEA has an answer to this problem now. AEA, a ribbon microphone company has recently debuted their online listening room.

This online listening room allows for the buyer to hear the certain microphones before they buy it. At this time, there are not many mics to listen to, but it is still a very interesting concept. The online listening room offers some samples with just the microphones and some that also use AEA preamps. The samples with the preamps are especially interesting. For some samples they not only include the isolated instrument track, but they also include the full mix so you can hear how the recorded instrument sits in the mix.

As the author of the Mix Magazine article on this topic pointed out, the listening room uses SoundCloud to post the samples. Though SoundCloud yields lower quality than desirable, AEA has made high quality, uncompressed files to download.

I think it is helpful that they used SoundCloud for a few reasons. For one, many, many people are now using it. It can be helpful to hear how the sound of the microphone is going to compress down to that formatting. It is very important to still have good sound on something like SoundCloud or whatever other site an artist uses to broadcast their music. Another reason I think using SoundCloud for this project is good is because people listening to the samples can easily comment on the sample tracks. These comments may help other customers. If there are any questions, they can be asked right on the track at the specific time that their question pertains to. It would make easy for people to discuss things about the microphones. This could cut down on people having to do more outside research on the microphone (though it would be wise to still do more research).

Overall, I think this online listening room is a fantastic idea. It allows for a new level of communication between the manufacturer and the customer.