I just bought a Collings MT to replace my Morgan Monroe MAM-200. I love playing it and I think it sounds much better, but I'm curious: how does it compare out in the hall when I play it for dances? I made recordings [1] of the 3/22 Brooklyn dance where I played my old mandolin and the 3/24 Powder Mill Barn dance where I played my new one, which means we can compare them.

Of the ~14 sets we played each night we played six both nights. I listened through each of the six paired tracks and picked segments where I was playing similarly. They are below, in random order, for blind comparison:

Shenandoah Falls	chords	A	B
Brenda Stubbert's	chords	A	B
Far From Home	melody	A	B
Speed the Plow	chords	A	B
Rainy Night in Montague	chords	A	B
Julia's Waltz	melody	A	B
Seanamac Tube Station	chords	A	B
Thomas Shrug's March	chords	A	B
Thomas Shrug's March	melody	A	B
Devil in the Strawstack	chords	A	B
Toothfairy Jig	chords	A	B

The key is here, but listen and form your opinions before unblinding yourself!

What this test doesn't capture is I think the biggest advantage of the new mandolin: it's much louder. With the old one I could barely hear myself acoustically and I could almost never have enough of it in the monitor without feedback, and while the new one isn't as loud as a fiddle it's still loud enough that I can hear it acoustically and I have the flexibility to put it as loud as I want it in the monitor.

(Other reasons I like the new mandolin more: it's easier to play and keeps it's tuning better.)

Shenandoah Falls	chords	old	new
Brenda Stubbert's	chords	old	new
Far From Home	melody	old	new
Speed the Plow	chords	old	new
Rainy Night in Montague	chords	old	new
Julia's Waltz	melody	old	new
Seanamac Tube Station	chords	old	new
Thomas Shrug's March	chords	old	new
Thomas Shrug's March	melody	old	new
Devil in the Strawstack	chords	old	new
Toothfairy Jig	chords	old	new

[1] All recordings were with an sm57 into a vsl1818 audio interface, and are just the mandolin track. Both mandolins had D'Addario J74 Phosphor Bronze strings, though the ones on my older mandolin are getting old. The low thumps on the new mandolin are because there's no eq (low-cut) on any of the recordings and the mic stand was much closer to my feet the night with the new mandolin. The recordings all the raw .wav files at the original sample rate, and I adjusted their volume levels with sox --norm=-6 foo.wav foo-normalized.wav