Recording - February 2011 - 48

Coles 4050 Stereo Ribbon Microphone
Coles, then mixed in a vocal feed. In the small and reflective room, the cymbals sounded excessively harsh in the room, but they smoothed out nicely in the overall mics, without the guitar or bass sounds being adversely affected. This is a great, grey sound for jazz drums but I am surprised how well it worked for rock as well. Thoughts and observations A lot of ribbon mics have a certain amount of “compression” effect going on at high levels because the magnetic field isn’t even and when the ribbon is deflected farther out, the field there is less strong. But I didn’t notice that at all on these mics, for good or for bad. Now, I have to say that I don’t have a Coles 4040 sitting around to do a direct comparison, but the individual microphones out of the 4050 system sound just like what I remember the 4040 sounding like. And I liked the 4040 a whole lot—see my April 2004 review for details. This microphone doesn’t sound like an old RCA ribbon mic or a Coles 4038, and it’s clearly designed for farfield miking although it does a pretty nice job as a close-working mic as well. If you have listened to any of the classic recordings made by Composers Recordings, Inc. in the seventies, they were all made by David Hancock using a pair of widely-spaced homebrew ribbon microphones. The tonal characteristics of those albums as are close as I can come to describing how these mics sound on

directly beside or behind the grille of the lower-mounted microphone, which almost certainly has an acoustical effect. However, you can counter this by putting the microphones on a boom and distancing them from the stand by one or two feet. Listening tests I started with the key jingle test and my result was pretty good. The recording of a set of jingling keys wasn’t quite as detailed as the keys were in real life; the top end of the mic was definitely lacking in detail. But, they weren’t in any way harsh or unpleasant and they weren’t excessively clangy, indicating the upper midrange response was clean. Verifying this, a piano recording in a good room was very good, and it took a little bit of the bite out of the sound of a Yamaha concert grand that was maybe a bit too harsh on top by itself. By contrast, if you put an RCA 77DX up on a piano, it sounds like the piano is holding its nose. The overall midrange cleanliness on the 4050 was very good without any of that clang or nasal stuff going on. These mics have good, solid nulls, and in order to have a good null, a figure-8 needs to have good matching between the front and rear lobes. That’s a critical thing that many of the inexpensive

for jazz vocals, both male and female. It doesn’t have upper midrange problems that screw up female vocals. On a small student orchestra, it took the bite off the top of the strings and brass and mellowed things out while still keeping clean midrange. Comparing it with a pair of Schoeps

The 4050, like the 4040, remains the cleanest-sounding conventional ribbon I have used.
ribbons fail to do properly. These mics do it very well, better than most of the old RCAs. On a close-miked vocal, there was an enormous proximity effect—the natural result of the narrow and accurate figure-8 pattern. The end result was a vocal sound that was in many ways a cleaner version of the classic 1950s radio announcer sound; it was big but it was not artificial-sounding. This is a really, really nice microphone
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RECORDING FEBRUARY 2011

hypercardioids in ORTF, the Coles mics wanted to be mounted very far behind the Schoeps in order to get a similar image, and they didn’t have the top end sheen of the Schoeps. I think that sheen more reflects what I hear in the hall, but I know a lot of people disagree with that. I tried the mics as overall stage mics on a small punk rock group in a club where the PA was used only for vocals. I miked the band acoustically with the

an orchestral or small chamber group recording. On the bench I don’t have facilities to do very good frequency response measurements on figure-8 mics. What I could verify, though, is that these mics have a little presence peak, and the top end response didn’t start dropping substantially until very far up, around 16 kHz with the mic unloaded. That’s

Recording - February 2011

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