Feb 16, 2006 3:57 PM

Winner of the 2005 Grammy Award for Best Classical Crossover Album, the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet (LAGQ) group is out on tour with Neumann KM 184 microphones.

"The KM 184s have really worked well for us," LAGQ member William Kanengiser reports. "We tour a lot, and we've found that they're really portable and really durable. The sound engineers at the venue always have a big smile on their face when they see our mics. They usually just set the EQ flat and it sounds great.

"The guitar is a notoriously difficult instrument to mike," continues Kanengiser. "It's very quiet, and the sound source on a classical guitar is pretty small. On top of that, guitars are unbalanced in terms of their frequency response. They have wolf tones in the low range, spikes in the middle, the body itself has its own resonant frequency and you've got to deal with the squawk factor on the strings that can create an unwanted upper-high-end sound.

"We had a lot of problems in the past when we didn't have the right mics in front of our guitars, but the KM 184 evens things out. It's a no-brainer for us. We have the spot. We place the mics. And even with different halls, sound setups and engineers, these mics work extremely smoothly. There's a richness of the wood from a nylon string guitar that is hard to capture and the wrong mic will make it sound plastic and flat, but with the Neumann, we get the depth and that intangible thing called the 'natural sound.' The result is what we think of as 'stealth amplification,' where people aren't even aware that sound reinforcement is taking place. They just hear the full picture of what we're doing."

For more information, visit www.neumannusa.com.

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