OWEN O'MALLEY: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. This is Owen O'Malley. Today, we're going to be taking a look at the Audix OM2.

The Audix OM2 is a dynamic, hypercardiod vocal mic. It's handheld. It's made to be used for live vocal applications although you can use on a bunch of different applications like hand percussion, drums, guitar cabinets, basically anything that you would use an SM58 to mic. The OM2 is the exact same price in most retailers as an SM58. It's made as a direct competition for the SM58. In my opinion, at least in live situations, it outperforms the SM58. I think it's a clearer sounding microphone, and I am not paid by Audix to say this but I wish I was.

So, we're going to compare it to this 58. Now, the 58, as you can hear, is still a pretty excellent sounding microphone. This one is at least 20 years old. It's been beat to crap and it's totally in perfect working condition. They're really easy to service. That's the reason that you'll find the 58 in basically any live venue worth its salt. They're nearly indestructible. I've actually watched a New York City garbage truck run over a 58 and used the same mic that day. I washed it off first.

But, there is a little bit of boominess in the sort of lower mids, especially with close proximities, spoken vocals like this, that the OM2 I think clears up a little bit. Again, very similar sounding capsules. There's just a little bit more clarity in the OM2. When you are mixing live sound with a very high volume and a very dense mix, it makes a huge difference. It's just so much less effort trying to bring vocalists out of a really dense mix. Whenever I get to use an OM2 in a live situation, I know that my job is going to be much easier.

Now, when you're doing spoken word, it doesn't make that much of a difference, as you can hear. So, what we're going to do is I'm going to AB the two mics and play a little acoustic guitar for you to give you maybe a little bit of a sense of how the OM2 interacts with instruments in a live setting, so let's do the work.

Okay, so I've got my two mics EQ'd identically, the gains are identical. Any requests? Oh, I like that.

[OWEN SINGING "SURF WAX AMERICA" BY WEEZER AND PLAYING ACOUSTIC GUITAR]

[ON SM58] You take your car to work I'll take my board [ON OM2] And when you're out of fuel I'm still afloat

[ON SM58] All along the undertow Is strengthening it's hold [ON OM2] I never thought it would come to this Now I can never go home

[ON SM58] All along the undertow Is strengthening it's hold [ON OM2] I never thought it would come to this Now I can never go home

Welcome to the Gearwire feedback lab where we create recursive feedback loops. As you can see, we've got our OM2 and our SM58 set up at the same off-axis angle from this driver. They're also equidistant capsule-wise from the driver. We're going to see which mic is better at rejecting feedback, off-axis feedback. I'm going to be going to the board here and slowly raising the gain levels on the two mics individually to see where the rejection thresholds actually are, so let's a take a closer look at these knobs.

Okay, so we've got our Audix OM2 on channel 1 and our Shure 58 on channel 2. Let's raise these levels real slowly here [OWEN RAISES GAIN ON AUDIX OM2]. Okay, that's the 12 o'clock, starting to hear it. Yeah. So just shy of 12 o'clock on this dial. There's no actual decibel metering here on this little Yamaha board but you get continuous feedback just shy of 12 o'clock.

Let's hear the 58. [OWEN RAISES GAIN ON SHURE SM58]. Okay, we're at 12 o'clock. We're starting to hear a little something. Yeah, there we go. Much different frequency but actually you can hear feedback starting at two frequencies, one similar to the OM5 and then one lower frequency but they don't really get continuous until little after 12 o'clock on this dial. So, it looks like it's safe to say that the 58 has slightly better feedback rejection. The OM5 is definitely a hotter sounding mic, so that probably contributes to some of it here. Again, this is not the the most scientific of field tests but you get a rough idea of what you might be dealing with on a smaller, medium sized venue with these two mics.

Alright. Well, thanks for joining us at Gearwire.Com. I'm Owen O'Malley, and this has been a side-by-side comparison of the Audix OM-2 and the Shure SM58. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.