A ramble about the Audio Technica AT2020

I just had a bit of an epiphany the last couple of days and I wanted to vent a bit lol.

I’ve been using a Neumann TLM 103 to record vocals for years and I’ve had a pretty difficult relationship with the mic, but I kept telling myself the mic could not be the problem because of the price and industry reputation. ‘It’s a Neumann, it must be something else’.

But last week I was mixing a song, struggling to get the vocal to sound right and I finally had enough. I opened up an empty project and just spent a couple of hours testing out every microphone I owned (a handful of mics at very different pricepoints), giving them all a run for their money with different settings on my tracking gear, different types of vocals,…

Turns out I enjoy my old Audio Technica AT2020 the most, and it is not even that close.

I feel like the Neumann will sound better on 1% of all my source material, and when it does it will sound amazing, but the vast majority of the time I’m just fixing issues with it… Too bright, too detailed and unforgiving, too much proximity effect,... I’ve kinda gone through it all with this mic lol (mind you I have recorded 30+ full songs with it).

Because I couldn’t make the mic work for me I started building an actual vocal booth, I bought hardware preamps and compressors. I even started looking into buying other expensive microphones because I thought that would be what I was missing, but turns out it was not that after all. Don’t get me wrong, they all improved my results and I will continue to use these things to my advantage with my cheap mic, but I could’ve been in a very different-looking studio if I had just done proper mic tests a couple of years ago.

I can’t believe that only now I took the time to just test all my options thoroughly and that the €100 mic is the solution to my issues. I wasted soooo much time and energy trying to love the €1000+ mic…

Anyway I don’t know why I’m posting this lol. Anyone else that has had similar experiences? I feel so stupid for not trusting my gut and just going back to the AT2020 like 3 years ago 😅