Recording - October 2015 - 48

B Y PA U L V N U K J R .

Samar Audio Design
VL37 Ribbon Mic
A boutique maker's newest ribbon offers
elegant performance and unique tonality
Samar Audio Design is a ribbon mic manufacturer based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Founded
by Russian recording engineer / electronics
engineer / concert pianist Dr. Mark Fouxman,
Samar describes itself as making microphones
"built in an artisan tradition." Each Samar mic
is made completely in-house, from its stainless
steel endcaps to its custom-wound transformer,
and sold direct to customers rather than
through distributors or dealers.
Samar's flagship mic, which I got to see and
hear briefly at the 2013 AES Convention in
New York, is the boutique and unique MF65.
It is a high quality precision build with an integrated stainless steel shockmount and stunning
maple box, the kind in which high-end wines
or liquor might be sold. It has a reported frequency response of 20 Hz up to higher than
25 kHz. That gives the MF65 perhaps the
widest frequency response of any figure-8 ribbon mic on the planet.
Of course at $1999 a pop, the MF65 is a
pretty serious investment. That is why Samar
took on the task of designing a new model that
offers exactly the same internal components
and many of the MF65's body design elements
and boasts the same specs, but cuts costs by
removing many of the hi-end extras-the
maple presentation box, the shockmount, and
so on. This new model is the VL37, and I had
a period of several months to work with a pair;
all of the photos accompanying this review
were taken in my studio as I put the VL37 to
work on all manner of sessions and sources.
Meet the VL37
The VL37 is a figure-8 passive ribbon microphone. Its body is made of precision
machined stainless steel. It measures 6.375"
long with a diameter of 1.3" and is a solid
8.2 oz.
It uses a rigid honeycomb style corrugated
grille with a second tighter weave/perforated
grille in the inside (that works as a built-in airredirecting pop filter). Its fit and finish are so well
done that if it weren't for the small recessed
Allen screw holes, you would be hard pressed
to tell where the top and bottom end caps are
48

RECORDING October 2015

attached... and I'm told that current runs of the
mic actually screw together like the MF65, so
even those screw holes will be gone!
Everything about this mic feels classy and
well built. It comes in a small foam-lined wooden box with an off-the-shelf third-party shock
style clip mount. AEA uses this same mount for
the Nuvo series ribbon mics.
Internals
Internally the VL37 uses a proprietary corrugated ribbon that measures 2" x 0.25" and
is 1.5 microns thin. The ribbon appears to be
internally protected by another thin layer of
screening and uses a proprietary fine-tuning
adjustment which helps maintain consistency.
Samar claims that its sophisticated ribbon
motor has the "shortest front-to-back path ever
seen in ribbon microphones."
Its specs include a sensitivity of 2mV/Pa and
an output impedance of 250 Ohm. There are
no other specs listed on the site or provided
with the mic, although Mark Fouxman says it's
been tested with a 140 dB SPL source and
showed no distortion at all, so its maximum SPL
could be as high as 160 dB. Still, while specs
are nice, we listen with our ears...
I can say that while the VL37 is not the
hottest passive ribbon in my collection, through
my Millennia Media HV-3D set to 49.5 dB of
input gain, I was still able to do spoken word
tests and achieve average levels in my DAW of
-6 dB with next to no added noise. In practical
terms, that means that this is a very clean and
quiet ribbon with a good output level that is
low compared to most condenser mics, but still
in line with most passive ribbons. If that's not
enough, consider pairing this mic with a Cloud
Microphones Cloudlifter CL-1; I did, and the
Cloud inline amplifier made the VL37 almost
frighteningly strong and clear!
Frequency, proximity, rejection and lobes
The VL37's frequency response is surprisingly
close to that of its more costly sibling. It is pretty
much ruler flat from 20 Hz up to 5 kHz with only
the slightest of occasional rises and falls. From
there, there is a slight 1 to 2 dB rise around 10

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - October 2015