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!