So my daughter wanted a pink mic. She didn't care what was inside. Her biggest design requirement was that it had to be pink. She would have been perfectly happy with a pink BM-800, but she would have spent the next years fighting with the thing to make it not sound like trash.
I started with an MA-87 from Amazon ( https://www.amazon.com/MA-87-Studio-Condenser-Microphone-Recording/dp/B0C1TLLLDT ). Availability on Amazon is spotty, but they are usually available on eBay for like $25-$30 or so. I didn't even bother plugging the thing in when I got it... it was immediately turned into an empty shell.
I used the bias generator circuit that @rogs pointed me to in another thread and it works perfectly. The head amp is a single FET (2N5457), drain-follower, into a Neutrik 10-3. The capsule is the left-over 32mm from the Apex 460 -> C12 conversion that I did a month or so ago. The 3-way pattern switch works, the mic is quite, what's not to like. And oh yeah, it's pink!!
I missed a couple of caps on the board, so they are just soldered in, and I needed to change a couple of resistor values in the power circuit to get things back to the right place given the additional current draw of the bias circuit, so it's not "factory manufactured" perfect. I've redesigned the boards should I want to build one of these for myself in the future (which is likely).
I started with an MA-87 from Amazon ( https://www.amazon.com/MA-87-Studio-Condenser-Microphone-Recording/dp/B0C1TLLLDT ). Availability on Amazon is spotty, but they are usually available on eBay for like $25-$30 or so. I didn't even bother plugging the thing in when I got it... it was immediately turned into an empty shell.
I used the bias generator circuit that @rogs pointed me to in another thread and it works perfectly. The head amp is a single FET (2N5457), drain-follower, into a Neutrik 10-3. The capsule is the left-over 32mm from the Apex 460 -> C12 conversion that I did a month or so ago. The 3-way pattern switch works, the mic is quite, what's not to like. And oh yeah, it's pink!!
I missed a couple of caps on the board, so they are just soldered in, and I needed to change a couple of resistor values in the power circuit to get things back to the right place given the additional current draw of the bias circuit, so it's not "factory manufactured" perfect. I've redesigned the boards should I want to build one of these for myself in the future (which is likely).
