Recording - December 2016 - 36

With apologies to William S. Gilbert (and Ko-Ko), I've got a
list too, but not of "society offenders who might well be underground". Rather, as befits an audio guy, my list is of microphones-microphones that are gone but not forgotten, and
deserving of rescue from the "waters of oblivion".
The idea for this article came from Neumann's recent reintroduction of the U 47 fet mic, in as close to an exact replica as
they could manage. They did a good job (see our review, Recording
February 2015); they used identical metalwork, an identical capsule
and the same electronics and transformer as the original.
In a conversation with Editor Mike Metlay, one of us (I'm
not sure which) wondered out loud whether there were other
discontinued microphones deserving of rebirth, and I began
making lists.
There's often a temptation, when a manufacturer brings back
a favorite discontinued mic, to "modernize" it by adding technological wrinkles that weren't available during the mic's first
life; my experience has been that the "improvements" usually
vitiate the mic's original sound, leaving a pallid copy of the
original. The premise of this article is to encourage bringing
back the originals, using the same tooling and materials. Don't
mess with success-we want the classics, vintage warts and all,
not the bowdlerized "inspired by" versions. (I make one important exception to this rule, which we'll get to in due course.)
There have been a lot of mics designed since 1916, when the
first patent on a practical condenser mic was
applied for, and quite a few ripe-for-rebirth

candidates have been abandoned by the wayside. One question arises, though: which microphone is the classic?
Manufacturers changed microphones over the course of their
lives; when the Neumann KM 84 was first introduced, for
example, it used tantalum coupling capacitors at several spots
in the circuit and resistors in series with the output. A later
model had output levels that were 6 dB hotter for a given SPL,
and no output resistors. The last KM 84s apparently used aluminum electrolytic capacitors rather than tantalum. Which is the
one that should be brought back? (In the case of the KM 84 I'm
unilaterally declaring that the later model-hotter outputs, aluminum capacitors - is the one I want to see reborn; I have a
pair of those, and think they were the best-sounding mics of the
KM 84 production run. Arbitrary, but hey, it's my little list.)
Along with descriptions of the mics (alphabetically listed by
manufacturer), I'm including pictures and frequency response
curves. Yes, I know that a frontal response curve doesn't tell
anything like the whole story of what a mic sounds like, but,
taking the curve with the requisite grain of salt, it does give
you a rough sketch.
For many of the pictures I'm deeply indebted to the
www.coutant.org website. Professor Coutant has a remarkable
collection of microphones, for which he's posted photos and
charts that he's been kind enough to grant us permission to
use. Many of these are "vintage" photos; sorry about their
quality. For two of the photos (6 and 9), I would like to thank
Matt McGlynn of recordinghacks.com. To the list!

By Paul J. Stamler
AKG D12E
This was a dynamic mic designed expressly for low-frequency instruments-bass cabinets, double basses and particularly kickdrums-that
saw a lot of use on classic sessions in the 1970s. It had a bump in the
frequency response centered at 80-90 Hz and enough proximity effect
to give a big kick sound (one engineer I know who used the D12E
extensively called it a "fat, round sound"). There was also a small bump
at 1200 Hz to help grab the noise of the beater hitting the skin.
A lot of kick mics have tried to replicate the D12E's characteristics, and AKG has released impressive new
designs like the D12VR (reviewed February 2013), but to my ears, none of them has quite managed to capture the same magic. How about bringing back the original?

AKG D224E
This was a rare bird: a dynamic microphone with separate capsules for low and high frequencies,
combined using a crossover network. Kind of like a woofer and tweeter in reverse, and in fact AKG
used the slogan "refoow dna reteewt" in their advertising. Unusually for a cardioid mic, the D224E
had little or no proximity effect, but it still included low-frequency filtering to chop out room noise.
When I worked at Channel Nine we had six of these, and I used them a lot-on trumpet, drum
overhead, piano, acoustic guitar, congas, and even a talk show host who couldn't use the usual
clip-on lavalier (she wore chiffon blouses, which rustled).
Wherever I used a D224E, the results could best be described as magical. They sounded
preternaturally smooth, but not in the "no-high-frequencies" sense. Rather the sound was silky and
palpable in a way that was audible on any monitor speakers I used.
There was just one problem, as I discovered: these mics were fragile, and needed to be handled with
kid gloves. So I want AKG to bring the D224E back, but if there's a way to fix the fragility without killing
the wonderful sound, I'll make an exception to my "exact replica" rule. Just once, you understand.
36

RECORDING DECEMBER 2016

http://www.coutant.org http://www.recordinghacks.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - December 2016