Wordsushi said:
I'm sure the guy who has worked with John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Amy Grant, Cypress Hill, Sting, Anthrax, Aerosmith and lots of other major artists and owns busy studios on both coasts, has no idea what a good 87 sounds like, especially the one that he calls his favorite mic of all time. If his mic is thrashed, then I'm sure he's a fool to be using it.
In all fairness, you get used to what you are hearing, even if it's broken. If it's your
special mic, you make assumptions. His mic may be brilliant, it may be somewhere less. Mics are far harder to objectively quantify, and I know for certain you can go through a pile of same type preamps by ear and think they all sound fine
merely because they pass non-offensive audio in a certain context, yet measurements will tell you some number of them have significant problems, like no low end at all. The brain is really great at filling in missing content...just think of the crazy bandpass filtering people do in mixes to make things fit. I don't mean to offend, but the point needs to be considered. You have had a direct comparison, so that's a bit more than the average report around here, if you compare against a 3rd and 4th sample you'll know even more.
kingkorg's points are well taken, and must be considered in the overall context. I and many others rarely if never find a clone that sounds anything like the real thing, and it's a fallacy that has to be constantly dismissed. People waste vast amounts of time chasing clone perfection to no satisfactory end, when the $/time ratio still votes in favor of getting the real thing. If you're happy with you mic on it's own terms, that's a different thing. There's plenty of info in this and all the other mentioned threads. Spend the 3 hours making a personal notes document from the threads if you haven't, it's really the only way I've found. Followed by making changes and recording control samples to compare.
I believe Jim Williams and Klaus Heyne both change C4 as much for phase effects they claim to hear, as anything. I think Klaus removes it altogether, which risks destruction of the FET from spurious events, though he says it never seems to happen.
The capsule and the transformer always make the biggest difference, any mic, period. Even a Neumann capsule will show the variance kingkorg shows in his graph and be within factory spec. Changing either of those parts will do more for you than changing amplifier parts IMO. Good luck.