Road Test: The Encore 100 & 200 From Blue Microphones

Build
After taking in the appearance of these mics, I noticed that they seem to be very solidly built.

They have a good “heavy” feel to them and seem like they could stand up to life on the road.

Of course, we’re not allowed to torture test items in the road test so I can’t say for sure how durable they are but they seem solid.

I did have a little trouble getting the XLR cables to lock into these mics, especially on the Encore 200.

Sometimes they would lock in but the lock on the connector wouldn’t spring up like normal to confirm that they were locked in.

It was only after I tugged on the cable a bit that I was sure they were locked in. That was a bit of an annoyance for me but not a deal breaker by any means.

Encore 100 vs. SM58
I started off my comparison by setting up the whole band as normal with SM58’s on all vocalists. I wanted to hear the SM58 in that particular room with that particular setup just to get a baseline for comparison.

I wanted to hear a direct A/B comparison of the SM58 and the Encore 100 with the same rig, same room, exact same setup.

So after listening to my lead vocalist through an SM58 for a little bit, I swapped him over to the Encore 100. I just swapped the mic and didn’t touch the channel EQ or change anything else at all.

My first impression of the Encore 100 was that it sounded noticeably richer and fuller and just sounded more natural than the SM58. It also seemed a tiny bit hotter level wise than the SM58.

Even my singer thought from behind the PA that it was a noticeable difference in the house mix and he also thought it sounded better in his IEMs. We were doing a multi-day event so I left him on the Encore 100 for the first night so that I could listen to it through a normal set.

The more time he spent singing through the mic, the more I was able to observe about it. One thing that I noticed was that the handling noise seemed to be much more than an SM58. The mic was in a stand the whole time but if he stepped heavily on the stage in front of the mic stand or clipped a capo onto the stand between songs I could definitely hear it in the house.

On the positive side, the Encore 100 seemed to exhibit less of a proximity effect than the SM58. Normally when my lead singer sings a really low passage he has to get real close to the mic and push his vocal to give me enough level to get him up over the rest of the mix.

What normally happens on a 58 is that the low end in his vocal becomes muddy and the overall vocal isn’t as clear. However, when he would get real close with the Encore 100 I didn’t experience the low end muddiness that I am used to. His low vocal parts came through much clearer and more intelligible than I am used to.

Encore 200 First Impressions
Since I wanted to leave the Encore 100 on the lead vocalist for the night, and since I had two Encore 200’s and two background vocalists, I tried the Encore 200’s on the BGV’s.

When I sound-checked the first BGV with the Encore 200, my first impression was that it sounded better than the SM58 he was just on but I quickly realized I didn’t have enough gain before feedback for it to be usable. Remember that I’m not using stage monitors so this was feedback from the house that I was getting.

I tried it on the other BGV just to see if it was any different for him but had the same issue. Of course, the BGV’s are stage left and stage right putting them closer to the mains than my lead vocalist who is center stage so I thought I might still be able to use it for lead vocal.

Just for kicks, I tried the Encore 200 on electric guitar. The Encore 200 sounded very dull compared to the Sennheiser e609 that I had just replaced. I’m assuming it was the high SPL coming from the guitar amp that was causing it to not perform so well.

No amount of EQ seemed to help it either. I was running the e609 nearly flat as I know where to mic the amp to get a great sound out of it. I quickly realized the Encore 200 wasn’t going to cut it for electric guitar and switched back to the e609.

Don’t forget to check out the rest of the discussion on the Encore 100 & 200 in the Sound Reinforcement forum!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *