I do not believe anyone can make a $100 Perception microphone sound exactly like a $3000 Neumann U87i.
AFAIK nobody's claiming it will sound
exactly like U87Ai; that's a bit of a straw man.
What exactly is it about a U87Ai that a much cheaper mic can't
very strongly resemble, if it has a well-made capsule of the same basic (K67/K87) type, and a very similar transformer-coupled circuit, as the Perceptions we're talking about do, and a similar overall frequency response?
What unobtainium or even hard-to-obtainium is there in a U87Ai, really?
As far as I understand it, the Takstar CTS-2 capsule used in the P420 is pretty consistently a well-made capsule of the general K67/K87 type, with good sensitivity and reasonable frequency response, side-to-side consistency, and max SPL.
That suggests to me that Takstar can do the hardest things in making a good K67/K87 type capsule: they can make the backplates very flat, and they can consistently drill holes about the right size in the backplates, and they can tension the diaphragms about right. (If the backplates weren't very flat they couldn't get the diaphragms close enough to get good sensitivity, or wouldn't be able to handle a high max spl without the diaphragm getting too close to the backplate sometimes and maybe hitting it, etc.)
Do you have any objective evidence that a Takstar CTS-2 is not actually a pretty good capsule of the K67/K87 type?
Similarly for the circuit. It's a part-for-part copy of the Neumann topology, although with some different parts used. I wouldn't expect it to sound very different from the Neumann circuit under most recording circumstances, if you get the HF rolloff about the same. It might distort differently when you drive it hard, because it uses a different transistor and probably doesn't have a carefully hand-adjusted bias to minimize THD, but for all I know it might distort similarly well, or even possibly more euphonically because of asymmetrical onset of distortion. But short of noticeable saturation, I'd expect the circuits to sound pretty darned similar, as amplifier circuits are prone to do when running clean.
IMO, copying a 60-plus-year-old solid state condenser mic pretty well
shouldn't be very expensive in 2025. Given my understanding of the ancient technologies used in the mic, and the technologies used to manufacture it, it seems entirely plausible that all these decades later you can get most of the performance for quite a small fraction of the price.
I also find it very plausible that just adjusting the frequency response has a big effect on how similar the two mics sound, because FR differences are the easiest, most obvious things for most people to hear.
But more to the point, I wonder why you want your microphone to sound exactly like a U87i?
Again, nobody is saying you can make a $200 Perception ($100 used) sound
exactly like a U87Ai. The big question is how close you can get, and the next question is just how much you care about any remaining differences you can hear.
The U87Ai is an industry standard mic in voiceover and on thousands of hit records, so it makes a good reference point.
If you can take a "cheap sounding" Chinese-made mic and roll off the treble, and it sounds remarkably similar to a high-priced industry standard mic, that's obviously very interesting to a lot of people.
A lot of people think cheap Chinese mics not only have too much treble, but they have
ugly treble, beyond there being simply too much of it. They think there's something wrong with the sound of cheap Chinese mics beyond their being too bright, that's far harder to fix.
I think they're largely wrong, at least in some cases, like the AKG Perceptions using Takstar CTS-1 and CTS-2 capsules, and some other mics using Beijing 797 Audio capsules like the CY002.
It's clear that a lot of musicians and recording engineers believe myths about EQ, such that they think that if you have to EQ a mic for it to sound good, there must be something more deeply wrong with the mic. They don't understand things like how Neumann designed the K67/K87 capsule to be used with EQ to tame the big hump in its sensitivity around 10KHz due to the primary capsule resonance.
Many musicians and recording engineers think that EQ is bad, and that if you have to EQ a mic to flatten it (or whatever), you will F up its impulse response or phase response or transient response.
That fear of using EQ is one reason people don't try very hard to figure out how to EQ a mic to sound its best... they think that if they have to know how to EQ the mic for it to sound good, they should simply toss it aside and try a "better," more expensive mic that needs less work, because its fundamentally better and will ultimately yield a better result.
There is enormous potential for confirmation bias there. If you pay $3000 for a prestigious, industry standard mic, you will not toss it aside lightly if it doesn't sound good on a particular source. You will change the mic position and angle, and/or even resort to using EQ, and you will keep at it for far longer than you will with a $200 mic. Expensive mics probably do sound better, if only because people are convinced they
can sound better, and will keep trying until they do.
I suspect it is because the U87i is famous for recording great music. While I understand the U87i is revered because so much great music was made with it - I suspect great music made the microphone famous, not the other way around! The music would have been great if recorded with a different microphone, perhaps making it the proverbial gold standard, instead. Why would I want to use the best microphone in 1970, when I can use the best microphone in 2025 - as if there has never been anything better in all these years. (Of course, I may be all wrong and the U87i really IS the best ever ... my point is I do not comprehend the point of buying Microphone A just to make it sound like Microphone B - In that case, I just save up and buy Microphone B.)
As you are new to this, I suspect you are still developing your personal recording and mixing style. Ultimately, a U87-like microphone may not best suit your personal style in the long run. Why limit yourself to just one sound when you are just beginning to develop YOUR sound? It is possible your sound would be better captured with an AKG C414, or Sennheiser MK8, or AustrianAudio OC18, or (perish the thought) a pair of well-placed, low cost, pencil-style small diaphragm condenser microphones which do not look as cool, but have their uses.
I mostly agree with this... it's not clear that you should roll off the highs of a Perception just like an 87, or just like a 67. For example, if you're recording instruments with significant signal in the high highs, you may want a broad notch filter at 10KHz to bring down the resonant bump in FR there, but not cut the highs highs well above that.
On the other hand, if you want a mic that's a reasonable approximation of one industry-standard mic, and you're starting with a Perception 100, making it sound more like a U87Ai seems like a worthwhile thing to try, because it actually is much like an 87Ai in terms of its capsule and circuit design. Trying to get it to sound like a fundamentally different kind of mic with a different kind of capsule (like the C12 type capsule in a C414 or OC18) might be less successful in terms of the off-axis sound, etc. (Although certainly worth trying; it's certainly not obvious that you shouldn't mix and match aspects of different kinds of mics.)
I would do that with EQ in a DAW and only modify the actual mic if I was convinced I knew how I wanted to use it by default going forward, and for some reason didn't want to EQ it in my DAW.
Personally, based on my own research and experience, I truly doubt your AKG Perception will every TRULY sound like a Neumann U87i.
What experience? Have you listened to the sound samples upthread? Can you give examples of when and how the EQ'd Perception fails to sound like a Neumann, or like a more expensive boutiquey imitation of a Neumann?
And what do even you mean by TRULY sound like a Neumann?
I think for some of us, most of the time, the EQ makes a big difference, and the remaining differences are subtle enough that we either just wouldn't notice or
wouldn't much care.
I've done a fair bit of A/B testing on AudioTestKitchen and discovered that the differences between $200 mics and $3000 mics are generally nowhere near as big as I'd have thought. The differences I clearly hear are mostly differences in overall frequency response, and when I control for that, the other differences tend to be less obvious, and often not obviously differences in quality---I might prefer the cheap mic or the expensive mic, depending on the particular mix or solo'd instrument I'm listening to.
That and listening to various other shootouts has led me to the conclusion that I personally don't actually need
any very expensive mics, or even moderately expensive boutique clones. If I can't make wonderful-sounding music with some AKG Perceptions and Rode NT1s and Line Audio CM4's and Shure SM57s, which I already own... it's just not the mics' fault. Those mics are good enough and varied enough that the remaining sonic faults are overwhelmingly mine.
I may be a tin-eared microphone Philistine who can't hear some differences others can, and doesn't care about some differences that others do, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people listening to my music wouldn't care much either, if they would notice at all.
This is an example of the age-old "cannot-make-a-purse-from-a-sow-s ear) sort of fallacy.
IMO an AKG Perception
is not a sow's ear. It is a marvel of modern manufacturing.
The idea that it
could be comparable to a Neumann is no more ridiculous than the idea that a cheap computer today is as powerful a very expensive computer from 30 years ago, and vastly cheaper and vastly more powerful than a computer from the 1960s, which is
obviously true.
Technology advances. Things like condenser microphones
ought to get considerably cheaper over the decades.
If they don't, it's a very interesting question
why not? What
exactly is so very hard about making a microphone, and so resistant to automation, that we don't see factor of 10 drops in price?
I truly do not believe ANY microphone can be modified for any price, let alone for a mere $100 /100EU, and truly sound like a Neumann U87i.
You have far more faith in people's ability to judge such things accurately than I do.
By this kind of argument, you'd think that expert wine tasting would be very consistent because wine experts would know what's good and what's not.
But it's not.
It used to be that the expert consensus was that French wines were head and shoulders above other countries' wines, and that experts were competent judges of such things who didn't need to taste things blind. Turned out the experts were largely bullshitting, and proper blind tasting undermined the conventional wisdom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_of_Paris_(wine)
Similarly, and in the realm of sound, you'd think that
professional violinists would know what violins were good, and their expert consensus that Stradivarius and Guarneri instruments were very superior would thus just be true.
But it turns out that in blind testing, professional violinists can't generally pick out the million-dollar prestige brands from the low-tens-of-thousands of dollar modern alternatives.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25371-pro-violinists-fail-to-spot-stradivarius-in-blind-test
https://www.npr.org/sections/health...arius-violin-easier-to-hear-science-says-nope
I think it's entirely reasonable to distrust the expert consensus that lets Neumann charge $3000 for a U87Ai.
I suspect that experts sometimes don't actually hear the differences they claim to, and that they sometimes misidentify some of the differences they hear (e.g., FR vs other things), and that they weight the differences they do actually hear too highly.
