Hello mates!
I've been thinking lately a lot about this topic. I noticed that people designing audio gear lean towards cleanest possible audio path. However, music producers lean towards dirt, artifacts, non linearity. Me being in the middle, I am all over the place, and like to have a choice.
This goes both for tube and SS. mics. We have transformers, tubes, transistors, and they all saturate, compress and affect signal in number of ways. Why not utilize that? Why use plugins, and other hardware when one can do it at the input. On drum room mics for example.
Now here is the reason. I have one Nady 1050 mic with k47 capsule i had time to mod, and it is as clean as possible, and wonderful sounding. On the other side i didn't have time to mod the other one, and the only thing i did was to put plate to ground cap to smooth high end and remove RF suppression caps. Rest was stock, high gain mic with 12AX7 and stock c6(schematic attached). I used it for a while as a room mic, just for the hell of it.
These days i decided to make it ''better''. I did all the usual mods, low gain/noise tube, lower b+, and I made another great vocal mic, BUT! The magic it did as drum room mic was gone! And i wasn't aware of this magic until i modded it!
Other example:
One of the best things i ever did was to keep stock transformer, and add Carnhill transformer to the output of Alctron (Neve) 1073 clone. I switch between transformers at will, and boy i am glad i have both of them there. I can say i have two different preamps just because of that! None of them is better, or worse.
The other reason i think about this is that i have built an Gyraf 1176 which i love, and for the first few days i was using it with bias wrongly set, as i didn't have time to do it. It simply wasn't 1176. But it was great in it's own way. It had long attack time, and output was saturating in totally different way, smoothing snap created by slow attack. I feel bad i didn't write down values for that setting.
Back to mics.
I get very different results by leaving, and removing C6 in this schematics for example. So the question would be, what can we do in existing already wide spread Schoeps/u87/tube circuits to actively manipulate saturation/compression artifacts. As far as i can tell most of other gear people use have higher level of THD than stock badly biased mics driven at reasonable levels with vocals, acoustic guitars, etc.
I notice that people upgrade mic output transformers for ones that saturate less than chinese ones (mostly in low end), and use them and test with female vocals. I mean, what is the point?
In my experience Carnhill trany saturates way more than stock chinese in GAP and other Neve rippofs.
So what if we go in the other direction, and make some switchable dirt mods? I mean, i would get one more 460 style mic anytime and overdrive all internal components to get most saturation and compression out of it for things like drum room. Maybe even with some kind of gain knob? Add another tube?
Once i sent vocal from daw to a 600:600 transformer and back into daw. I have no idea if it was just transformer, or if i created impedance mismatch, or something, but that vocal returned flawlessly compressed and mildly saturated. I ended up just EQing it a bit, and that was it.
I've been thinking lately a lot about this topic. I noticed that people designing audio gear lean towards cleanest possible audio path. However, music producers lean towards dirt, artifacts, non linearity. Me being in the middle, I am all over the place, and like to have a choice.
This goes both for tube and SS. mics. We have transformers, tubes, transistors, and they all saturate, compress and affect signal in number of ways. Why not utilize that? Why use plugins, and other hardware when one can do it at the input. On drum room mics for example.
Now here is the reason. I have one Nady 1050 mic with k47 capsule i had time to mod, and it is as clean as possible, and wonderful sounding. On the other side i didn't have time to mod the other one, and the only thing i did was to put plate to ground cap to smooth high end and remove RF suppression caps. Rest was stock, high gain mic with 12AX7 and stock c6(schematic attached). I used it for a while as a room mic, just for the hell of it.
These days i decided to make it ''better''. I did all the usual mods, low gain/noise tube, lower b+, and I made another great vocal mic, BUT! The magic it did as drum room mic was gone! And i wasn't aware of this magic until i modded it!
Other example:
One of the best things i ever did was to keep stock transformer, and add Carnhill transformer to the output of Alctron (Neve) 1073 clone. I switch between transformers at will, and boy i am glad i have both of them there. I can say i have two different preamps just because of that! None of them is better, or worse.
The other reason i think about this is that i have built an Gyraf 1176 which i love, and for the first few days i was using it with bias wrongly set, as i didn't have time to do it. It simply wasn't 1176. But it was great in it's own way. It had long attack time, and output was saturating in totally different way, smoothing snap created by slow attack. I feel bad i didn't write down values for that setting.
Back to mics.
I get very different results by leaving, and removing C6 in this schematics for example. So the question would be, what can we do in existing already wide spread Schoeps/u87/tube circuits to actively manipulate saturation/compression artifacts. As far as i can tell most of other gear people use have higher level of THD than stock badly biased mics driven at reasonable levels with vocals, acoustic guitars, etc.
I notice that people upgrade mic output transformers for ones that saturate less than chinese ones (mostly in low end), and use them and test with female vocals. I mean, what is the point?
In my experience Carnhill trany saturates way more than stock chinese in GAP and other Neve rippofs.
So what if we go in the other direction, and make some switchable dirt mods? I mean, i would get one more 460 style mic anytime and overdrive all internal components to get most saturation and compression out of it for things like drum room. Maybe even with some kind of gain knob? Add another tube?
Once i sent vocal from daw to a 600:600 transformer and back into daw. I have no idea if it was just transformer, or if i created impedance mismatch, or something, but that vocal returned flawlessly compressed and mildly saturated. I ended up just EQing it a bit, and that was it.
