Originally Posted by justanoldmuso
for lots of song creators with no money something is better than nothing.
I fully agree.

Originally Posted by justanoldmuso
the question is how big a gap is there tween spending over 1k on a mic viz a mic under 100 bucks.
It depends. Think of it this way - if you have five of a 1k mic, how much difference is there between each one? Likely not much. Similarly if you have five of a sub-$100 mic how much difference? Likely quite a lot - I've had cheap "matched" mics that didn't remotely sound the same. If you compare the best of the cheap mics to any of the expensive mics, yeah there might not be much difference, but what if you compare the worst one... My point is that - with cheap mics (and cheap gear in general) someone might watch or listen to a demo of a particularly good example and decide to buy it, then struggle to get the same results as they ended up with a rather poor one. And as well, you might find a cheap mic is usable on fewer sources - it might sound great only on female vocals but terrible on anything else, while an expensive mic might sound great on anything. I've yet to find anything that sounds bad on my SM7B or AT4050...

Consistency is why you pay 1k or more and why you see the big names in big studios.

Originally Posted by justanoldmuso
as ive said before ive used big boys gear many timews ...but ive also had nice results from cheapo gear many times..
(some pg users use behr interfaces and some rme.
Likewise, but I've often been lucky - and I used to work at the shop, so I could try things out extensively before buying them.

Originally Posted by justanoldmuso
i havent yet had someone be able to tell the mic diffs on my various songs vocs.)
I have - in the producer circles I run in I've had people pick out "hey you're using a different mic" quite a few times. They can't necessarily tell me what it is, but they can easily tell that it's different than on a previous track.

I work here