Some Cheap Chinese Microphones I recently bought and a warning

[Wordsushi]

Absolutely noname. Bought last year on alibaba. Schematically identical to U87Ai.
View attachment 97771View attachment 97772

How does it sound? I've seen these before and always wondered if they were usable.

 

[GeorgeToledo]

Does the U89 mean anything? I saw on RGO folks talking about the U89 circuit being used in Chinese U87i mics. And that Neumann also has a U89. U 89 i mt

Yours above look very similar but with differences in the styroflex capacitors on the printed side of the PCB?

Neumann developed a different circuit for handling the phantom power with U89 and added that specific part of the circuit to the U87 in 1986, changing the circuit name from U87 to U87A in the process. That led them to be able to achieve capsule polarization voltage similar to the earlier tube mics, so they switched the U87A to use the previous k67 capsule as opposed to the k87 (which was just a modified k67).

The current model is U87Ai, prior was U87i. i=XLR connector.

 

[Drosselmeier]

How does it sound? I've seen these before and always wondered if they were usable.

bad k47 type capsule

 

[Drosselmeier]

There might just be enough diodes and caps on the oscillator board for that to indeed be the full circuit, as in +/-60v AND +/-12v or whatever is used for the intermediate patterns. Just as the one in the AKG Perception 200/220, as discovered by Henry Spragens.

This was the case with the real Neumann, which had more soldering points for the parts. The chinese just wrote beautiful letters.

 

[Khron]

I'm a bit disappointed by those criss-crossed resistors near the top - tisk-tisk...

 

[RuudNL]

I think this could have been easily avoided if they had reversed the diodes.

 

[Mellow Audio]

I would never buy this stuff from China. There are only a few factories we purchase from.
Only problem is you need to buy in bulk.

 

[TimG]

I would never buy this stuff from China. There are only a few factories we purchase from.
Only problem is you need to buy in bulk.

Hi Mellow,
Quantity isn’t really much of an issue if you look around on Alibaba or Aliexpress. Anyone who is going to buy or sell 10 or 100 knows the relationship starts with a small transaction. I didn’t want to ask for freebies but some sellers will send a sample for postage.
I try to be truthful to the sellers as well.

And it’s a minefield still, between sellers with less than honest offers, and random quality issues, but there are fun and unexpected bargains if you play the game and you aren’t spending your last dollar.

I have had a dispute that was resolved through the Alipay system in my favor, and I think by asking all the questions, you can avoid problems. They hold the money in escrow until you receive AND accept quality is ok. Don’t OK before examining closely!

That said, I’m not super excited about everything coming from China. I bought some samples from a knob guy in south asia on Alibaba just in case! (meh).

 

[vinylwall]

I picked up a "U87Ai" clone from alibaba.com. Overall, the quality is quite nice. It was a touch over $500. I replaced the capsule with a genuine Neumann K870/K67 (but I took these pics before I swapped it). I'm actually quite pleased. The high end isn't over hyped at all like I was expecting (my quick tests were with the Neumann capsule). Compared to a real U87Ai it seems to be slightly longer. The body tubes match up pretty darn close, but I think the difference is in the headbasket.