Recording - September 2013 - 36

B Y PA U L V N U K J R .

Ashman Acoustics is a new company
started by microphone designer Matt
Ashman. Before branching out on his
own, Matt studied at the feet of AEA’s
Wes Dooley, where he says he learned
the “kung fu of acoustical design.”
According to the company website,
Ashman Acoustics’ goal is “to help make
good acoustical design affordable.” The
company’s first offering is the SOM50, and it
is quite unique in both its looks and its sound.
Design and build
The SOM50 is a small-diaphragm condenser microphone with a 6 mm pressuremode electret capsule. It ships in matched
pairs and comes with a pair of mic clips
in a plastic carrying case.
The mic is hand-built in Seattle, WA, and
its body is milled from a solid piece of
anodized aircraft aluminum. It measures 5"
long with 1.375" as its widest diameter. It
gets its unusual looks from design principles
rooted in acoustics and inspired by the
Neumann M50 microphone.
While the M50 looks from the outside to
be just another large-diaphragm mic, under
its grille is a small-diaphragm capsule that
is flush-mounted to a 4 cm plastic sphere.
Sound waves react much differently to a
spherical object than one that is flat, in a

Like most modern microphones it has a
frequency response of 20 Hz to 20 kHz.
Looking at the SOM50’s frequency plot, the
mic’s low end is fairly even, with minor
peaks and valleys of no more than a dB or
so, but at 2 kHz the frequency rises smoothly by an impressive 5–7 dB and peaks out
around 12 kHz before rolling smoothly
back down. It’s also at this same 2 kHz
where the SOM50’s pattern starts to shift
from omni to directional, as shown in the
polar plot at right.
Sound
The frequency plot implies that this mic
will definitely trend toward the bright
side, but while it’s getting clichéd in
reviews to read “not harsh or biting”, the
SOM50 really is not. I would put its top
end in the same camp as an Earthworksstyle mic, but the SOM50 is not as sonically laser-focused as an Earthworks.
The SOM50 exhibits a natural openness with a touch of pleasant softness.
This mic can at times sound like it isn’t
there at all, but not in a “straight wire
with gain” sort of way. It does such a convincing job of capturing and blending the
source and its surrounding space that it
can sound almost like you’re not miking
the instrument at all!

Ashman Acoustics

SOM50 Microphone
An unusual shape, an unusual heritage—and unusual yet eminently usable sound
way like wind behaves in a wind tunnel
when meeting rounded objects. The sonic
outcome is a microphone with a smooth rising frequency response, even off-axis rejection, and a very unique polar pattern.
On the SOM50 Matt Ashman calls the
unique pattern a SuperOmni™ pattern, and
what you get is a microphone with an omnidirectional low frequency response and a
unidirectional high frequency response.
Before we get into why that is cool and how
it sounds, let’s look at the SOM50’s specs
and frequency/polar plots.
Specs and graphs
The SOM50 has a sensitivity of
5.6mV/Pa @1 kHz (–34 dB rel. 1V/Pa),
a max SPL of 135 dB and 1% THD, an
150 ohm output impedance, and less than
28 dBA of self-noise.
36

RECORDING September 2013

While that may sound like hyperbole of
the highest order, this is exactly what this
type of spherical capsule design is known
for, and why Neumann M50s (often in a
Decca Tree configuration) are such a stalwart of classical recording. They captured and kept the instrument in its space.
This is where the SOM50 excels as
well—not in being a clone of the M50,
but in use and style.
In use
Getting to know the SOM50 took me a
bit of trial and error over a few weeks. I
kept taking it out, setting it up, trying it
and then putting it back in the box, favoring other microphones. As long as I kept
trying to get the SOM50 to do what my
other small-diaphragm condensers did,
the error was all mine.

This is not the type of microphone you
will reach for when you want a tight, dry or
punchy sound. The SOM50 requires some
distance to be appreciated. Give it even
just a few inches and it will never give you
a dry sound under any circumstances.
I am not saying you need the greatest
concert halls and spaces to use this mic,
but you need to be conscious and deliberate about the space you are going to
be recording in, because it will be featured along with the instrument or voice in
question. With today’s trend of folksy
Americana and reverb-drenched indie
rock, these make great mics for adding
ambience along with the source during
tracking rather than during mixdown.
To say this is a great room mic is
easy—it captures space and ambience
around everything, while still giving you

Recording - September 2013

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