OK, so more on the PR22.
Last week, I used them with good results on a local band with two lead singers, a guy with a serious Tom Waits thing (baritone voice and the hat) and a girl with strong pipes. I used one on the singer for the support act too. In both cases, the stage volume was quite reasonable and the singers were strong.
We had Xiu Xiu and Carla Bozulich's Evangelista in last night.
Now, if you don't know, Xiu Xiu are at the intersection of 80's English synth-pop/rock (New Order, Yaz, Erasure) and ambient experimental percussion (bells, glock, xylophone) plus a harmonium (which is an accordion that lives on a stand; IOW, the tool of a truly lazy devil). So backline is a drum kit, various percussion, a drum machine that makes weird noises, a sampler that makes weird noises and a synth that makes weird noises plus bass notes, and finally an electric guitar.
I put up the 22s for synthist Caralee and guitarist Jamie, and they did a couple of songs during soundcheck. Jamie's voice is sonorous yet not exactly strong. By the very rough indicator of such things, the input trim was up higher than usual. I cued up the channel in the cans and it turned out that I was getting as much of his guitar amp in his vocal mic as his voice. (And that guitar amp sounded great, even though it was six feet away from the mic.) Clearly not good. So once again, the obsolete 40-year-old ball microphone comes to the rescue and I get enough rejection to have his voice stand out from the din.
Evangelista was a different story ... the songs are tone poems supporting Carla's tales. She has a strong, resonant voice and she knows how to use it. With the PR22, the input trim was way down, and with low backline levels, I wasn't getting a lot of leakage. She sounded great.
All of this of course jibes with my previous observations: if you are working with a strong vocalist in front of a quiet band (or one on IEMs), then the mic truly shines. The wide pattern in this environment isn't a liability. I suspect this mic will be great on the singer-songwriter type.
If you are working with a band in the usual rock idiom where the singer isn't really strong, look elsewhere. The PR22 just doesn't work here. I can use EQ and compression to deal with proximity effect and the presence peak and such. But electronics can't mitigate leakage due to a wide pattern.
Again, a supercardioid version of this mic would be great.
-a