This microphone is legendary. However, even legends have (minor) weaknesses, which I'll discuss below.
I use this microphone nearly exclusively for voice, but have tested it on acoustic guitar as well. It excels at both, but I've not tested it enough on the guitar to determine if it's clearly a better or more balanced sound than more traditional options like the KM184.
Strengths: perfectly crystal clear, lively, crisp sound. Not overly sibilant, but still has a nice sizzle at the high end. The mids are rich, and the lower frequencies, while somewhat difficult to deal with in an untreated space, are manageable and sound nice.
Now, for two points that I think could be better or at least added as options for future designs:
1) switches on the back to attenuate certain frequencies. Totally optional, but could help people in non-ideal recording conditions to tune for their space at a hardware level instead of trying to fix it later with software.
2) the most baffling problem with this microphone, and why I at first thought it wasn't anything special: the foam windscreen it comes with, in my opinion, is not a good design and actually gives a bad first impression of this wonderful mic, at least to my ears and in the space I'm recording from. The mic itself, without the windscreen on, sounds incredible. It doesn't overly color the source or embellish it - it feels accurate, but not clinical or sterile. However, the foam windscreen sent with the mic is unusually thick and deadens the sound. It does do quite a good job at reducing plosives, but the cost to sound quality is too high for me. Using the mic without its foam screen does require better mic technique to avoid overpowering plosives, but the increase in purity and liveliness of the sound is worth it.
One solution that works: surprisingly, using the default grill style windscreen provided with the Icon Pro (also from Earthworks) on the Ethos gives the best compromise between plosives and liveliness and still sounds absolutely amazing. The chassis of the two mics are the same, so you can screw off the default foam windscreen and replace it with the Icon Pro's, if you have access to one, and see which you prefer.
In conclusion: the mic itself is absolutely brilliant. The foam windscreen that comes with it is not. It would be nice if both the Icon Pro's grill style wind screen and the default one with the Ethos were sent together, so the user can determine the best one for their use case, or at least have the option to switch them freely when needed.
