LCT 040 MATCH vs LCT 140 AIR

Henning Pauly alias Eytschpi42 tested, together with Alex Nasla from Geargods, the LCT 040 MATCH, LCT 140 AIR and compared them to his LCT 340's.

Next to acoustic guitar, shakers, tambourine, and kalimba. They've also tried to play a pan flute - but to be honest - they have to practice their pan flute skills a bit.

Anyway, it seems like Henning and Alex had a lot of fun testing the new mics and here are their two cents:  

"On the acoustic guitar, I felt that the LCT 040 MATCH had the least amount of bass [low-end], while the LCT 140 AIR added a little bit of bass [low-end] and the LCT 340 added a lot of bass [low-end]. But having a lot of bass is not always great, especially with the acoustic guitar, you want the clarity.

You could clearly hear the difference when we used the AIR mode with the LCT 140 AIR. In FLAT mode, the 140 is a little bit duller, while the mic sounds a little bit brighter in the AIR mode. In my opinion, the LCT 040 MATCH is sound-wise somewhere between that flat and air mode of the LCT 140 AIR. So for the acoustic guitar, I would go with the LCT 140 AIR or the LCT 340. 

I would say, if you're recording percussions the LCT 040 MATCH, the LCT 140 AIR and the LCT 340 are a great choice and we could not hear any difference between the 3 mics here. So I would go with the cheapest. 

They all pick up the transients just as good as each other. 

When it comes to room sound, the LCT 040 MATCH sounded brilliant and it is a really inexpensive mic. When we listened to the LCT 140 AIR it felt like the mic was much more in the back of the room and it gave us more room tone than heft, so definitely the LCT 040 MATCH kicked more ass. 

And when we went to the LCT 340 a lot of bass came in. So for room, it would be the LCT 040 MATCH or the LCT 340.

The fact that the LCT 040 MATCH has less bass might make it a very good drum overhead mic, since you don't want to keep the low-end in there. You want to capture the kick drum with the kick mic, but not with the overhead mics. So if you want to record overheads get a stereo pair of the LCT 040 MATCH, they're super light, super small and very easy to position. "