OK, quickie review. I did a show last night with my regular guys and I used the PR-22 on the singer/keyboardist, Dan. The singing guitarist got his usual Beta57A, which works very well for his voice.
First things first: in addition to being a musician, Dan is also a sound guy (which is his day job), so he knows how to work a mic. He's real good at backing off when he's not singing lead.
Now with something like a Beta57A, when he was on the mic singing lead, the pronounced proximity effect was a problem ... too much "whoomph" in the voice, which I usually took out using the channel-strip high-pass. (Oh, to have a multiband comp!) Of course when he backed off, his already-reedy tenor got even thinner.
With the PR-22, none of this is a problem. Backups sounded like leads. Spoken stuff between songs also didn't suffer from the whoomphiness. Getting monitors to adequate levels was not a problem. The channel strip was flat (system is EAW MK-series top boxes) and his voice sounded like his voice. (And we figure that the distortion I always hear with him singing, regardless of mic, console or system, is actually his voice. In the studio, he doesn't push his voice like he does live.)
So after the set, I asked him what he thought. He said that it sounded good, but he was getting a lot of stage wash in his wedge. "Everything seemed loud." I suppose that's more a function of the cardioid pattern rather than the super-cardioid of the Beta57A or the EV 757A I'd used for him in the past. (After all, that's why we use super- and hyper-cardioid mics!)
Also, while Bob doesn't publish polar plots of the mic response, I suspect that the pattern is wider than the obsolete ball-mic cardioid. As we all know, omnis don't exhibit any proximity effect, and my guess is that whatever ameliorates that effect in the PR-22 also serves to widen the pattern. Of course a uniform pattern (in the mic as well as the wedge) goes a long way towards feedback mitigation, so while the pattern is wider, lack of presence peak and other odd bumps in the pattern make monitors easier.
I would imagine that the mic will work well for the big shows I have coming up at beginning of July, as the band's stage volume is quite reasonable and the drummer isn't a basher.
But what I really want is a supercardioid version of this thing. How's that for a design challenge?
-a