ricardo said:
To kick U47s butt, a mike can't sound the same.
Ok well right off the top I have to throw the BS flag on that comment. If you've got an under $200 Chinese Microphone that sounds exactly like a U47, it kicks the U47's butt simply by costing under $200 and by a huge margin. I'll take ten of them right now. And the first thing I'll do with them is solder suck all of the ROHS lead free solder from every component and replace it with some good stuff that won't crack or whisker over time thereby rendering the device a boat anchor.
Look Ricardo, I've been building tube amplifiers since 1994 and I've heard all of the hand carved by virgins, this capacitor or that capacitor, holy grail horsesh*t there is out there and I'm here to tell you that I don't fall for any of it. In my tube amp world those types of fools say things like you have to use CC resistors in any clone of a famous amp to get their mojo when I know (from servicing hundreds of these old amps) that CC resistors only give you value drift; and nothing magical comes from that by anything other than random luck. In the microphone world those idiots say things like "..this cheap Chinese microphone sounds as good as a $10,000 Neumann"
I get where a double blind listening test would come in handy when modifying an already great sounding high quality circuit to a different circuit or with different component values or types, but this thread is about gutting a POS Chinese sub $200 microphone, and scavenging the body to make something that has a pretty high chance of far exceeding the original's performance. One doesn't need to do a DBTT to determine if an identical wine bottle full of ripple will be improved by filling it with Staglin Family Cabernet Sauvignon any more than one needs to do a DBLT before gutting a POS cheap Chinese mic and replacing it's components with a known good circuit with quality components and a high quality capsule designed to work with the circuit. I guarantee the odds are way in the favor of an improvement rather than downgrade under these circumstances. On top of that the man hours needed to perform a DBLT on a mic this cheap far exceeds it's value.
While your point is valid and without dispute in other situations, it is nothing but a sidebar comment in this thread and when made in a discussion of this particular topic only serves to make you sound like an elitist cork sniffer (since we aren't talking about expensive donor mics anyway) and appears to insinuate that those of us engaged in the gutting of cheap a$$ microphones (because empty body prices are now approaching ridiculous costs) to use their bodies for the construction of what we danged well know will be a better microphone aimed at our particular needs are a bunch of dummies.
So in short let me just say..."Got it." DBLT are a great preliminary first step before wasting money and labor trying to make an already really good or expensive thing better. But, I don't need anything but a recording test on any microphone to determine if it suits my needs in the studio. If it doesn't and it cost a lot of money then I sell it. If it doesn't and it cost almost nothing then the little bugger is going to the surgery room to be dissected and rebuilt like the six million dollar man. If it is a sub $200 Chinese unit, I buy it knowing it will probably not pass my studio tests and assume it is going to die so something better can live. I would never mod a microphone that sounds pretty good already or that cost a lot of money. So, I don't use DBLT. I'll leave that for the manufacturers who are trying to improve their product. I'd advise them to also use alpha and beta testers as well since many ears are a better representation of a market than just the R&D departments ears. No offense to you, but your comment doesn't apply here. Now if you've got some great design ideas for improving cheap Chinese mics, I'm all ears.
.. just suggesting it would be sensible to have a reality check on hand for comparison.
