Chinese made Large Diaphram Mic rating

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I'd be interested to know which of the chinese manufactured large diaphram condensers are considered 'worthy' as a stock standard unmodified mic. ie, which ones have a decent capsule and good sound.
 
The word on the street is "any with a 797 Audio capsule."

This would include the Behringer B-2 Pro, last I checked. It also includes several MXL mics, but I can't recall which ones.

It also includes all current Studio Projects mics (the exception to be is the Stephen Paul mic, which will have a custom capsule made here in the US), except those are already made with nice components and have no need to be modded.

That Behringer is cheap enough to snag and mod, I'd reckon.

Something else to keep in mind is Gus's comment on the quality of the body and the grill, and their acoustic properties being important to the sound of the mic. I don't know exactly what you want in this case (completely dead, or ringing at specific frequencies, or ???...). For that, I planned largely to do my own experiments.
 
You know, I made that comment in the ?Royer Mod? thread insinuating that I wouldn?t waste my efforts on a mic upgrade unless it used a 797 capsule (I like the 6-micron ones best, btw), but having said that, I?ve got a 6-micron Shanghai mic (similar to the old ADK 51 with the metal grille) that I dropped Scott Dorsey?s board into and it sounds very good. The V93 with the 797 3-micron is actually more accurate, but there?s a musical quality to the Shanghai mic that the 797 one doesn?t have. Some things just sound better through it.

The point is, they both turned out to be goods mics on their own accord, so maybe I shouldn?t have made that statement. The bottom line is, you just have to experiment to see what works for you. And, when you think about it, it really doesn?t matter that much because it?s not like you have to throw the parts away if you are not happy with the results. With mics being so cheap, you can just try the same parts on a different mic.

On top of all that, I have also learned that some mics are best left alone. I bought an Oktava 319 about a year ago and recorded some clips of me singing before I did anything to it. It had 680M resistors instead of 1Gs, a ceramic 1000pF, and a cheap, cheap, cheap 1uF electrolytic in the signal path. Thing was, since it sounded really good to begin with, I thought that with good parts and higher value resistors, it?d sound even better. Wrong! I wore the screws out on that thing taking it apart and putting it back together from changing parts and for the life of me, I still can?t get it to sound as good as it did. Unfortunately, I damaged the resistors trying to remove them, and so I can?t put it back like it was. Maybe the 680M had the FET biased differently or something, I don?t know. (BTW, anybody got any 680Megs?) Still today, I listen to the first unmodified clips that I recorded and wish I?d never touched it!
 
I thought it might be worth mentioning some tests a mate and I did the other evening.

We put up a non-branded Chinese valve mic (the usual 1/2 C24 plus cathode follower) which was stock, and a stock rebranded MXL FET mic. Plugged into a JLM BA with 99V opamps. Both share the same Shaghai capsule.

Anyway, we blind A/B'd them and firstly realised that they both sucked. They had that nasty "barking" midrange and sibilant high-end. Then we tried to identify which was which. This was surprisingly difficult, to the point where we would occasionally guess wrongly. They really did sound that similar. In the end, I think I could identify that the valve mic had a slightly softer high-end (but still horrible) and was possibly thicker sounding in the low mids (that area around say 200-400Hz or so).

I don't understand how you could get much use from that capsule. It sounds a bit like a telephone at times.

We also pulled out another Chinese mic which I have modded with a fairly typical plate out circuit and a 797 capsule which totally smoked the other Chinese mic. I'm fairly sure this is mainly due to the different capsule as I have tried a few with this particular mic.

Roddy
 
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