Recording - August 2014 - 34

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

Back in our August 2013 issue we introduced you to a microphone named
Edwina, from Philip Graham's Ear Trumpet
Labs. One quick look around the Ear
Trumpet Labs website will show you firsthand that these microphones look like no
other mics you have seen or used before.

Yes, there are a few other "colorful" companies (Blue being the first, followed by
Violet and JZ) who make microphones with
futuristic-meets-art-deco body designs, but
none of them utilizes Philip's bricolage aesthetic and building techniques. Before you
run off to look it up, I'll define that word for

Look! 'Tis Mabel!
Mabel starts with the same body as the
rest of the line, and makes use of the same
pivoting yoke assembly as the Edwina.
The lollipop-style head enclosure, however, is different than Edwina's-it is larger
and in many ways the most "traditional"

Ear Trumpet Labs Mabel Microphone
Audio elegance meets bricolage in a steampunk multipattern mic
you (I have a feeling I'll be defining it in
every Ear Trumpet review I ever do!).
Bricolage (bri-ko-lazh) is a fancy word
that describes art made from stuff that happens to be laying around, usually what
normal folks would call "junk." But like
any skilled bricoleur, Philip takes said
"junk"-like copper pipes, screen
mesh, springs, metal tidbits, wires, tubes,
and even bicycle sprockets-and finely
crafts it into a line of microphones that
would not be out of place on the set of
Firefly or any steampunk-inspired movie.
The court of nine sisters
If you nose around the Ear Trumpet
Labs website, you will be greeted by nine
copper-tinged beauties made up of the
abovementioned materials. Each one has
a distinct female name that was probably
quite high on baby name lists in the mid1800s.
Each mic is built upon the same 4" by
11/4" copper pipe body and then topped
off with a variety of head dressings featuring those bicycle sprockets, vintagestyle spring suspensions and swivel yokes.
A few of them are so unique that they are
either only available when the right parts
can be found... or are gone for the foreseeable future, like Helga and Doreen.
The previously-reviewed Edwina is one
of the most readily available, reproducible-and as such, popular-members of the Ear Trumpet Labs family. As a
quick refresher, Edwina is a largediaphragm microphone with a 26 cm, 6micron-thick electret condenser element
and a cardioid polar pattern.
I'm mentioning the Edwina mic again
here because the new model we are
reviewing this time around is essentially a
multipattern version of the Edwina... with
some sonic differences, of course. Her
name is Mabel.
34

RECORDING August 2014

head assembly Philip makes. Of course it
still has the Ear Trumpet flair.
It measures 21/2" across and 2" from
front to back, with a bulbous shape held in
place by a large brass ring with small functional and decorative screws. On its top is
a 3-position toggle switch for pattern selection: Omni, Cardioid and Figure-8.
Inside, it houses a dual version of the
26mm capsule found in Edwina, suspended
in a special internal shockmount that makes
use of Sorbothane™ for its internal damping. [If you recognize that word, it's probably because Sorbothane-the viscoelastic
polymer that's used in everything from running shoe soles to acoustic isolation products-features heavily in Bruce Black's DIY
speaker isolation article from March
2014.-MM]
Mabel uses a transformerless fully balanced FET circuit design. Mabel's electronics are hand-wired and built with the highest
quality film caps, precision resistors, and
hand-tested and matched transistors. Like
Edwina, Mabel ships in a red metal foamlined toolbox with a standard mic clip.
Mabel's measurements
Like Edwina, Mabel has a 20 Hz-16
kHz frequency response that's fairly flat
from 20 Hz up to 3 kHz, with a gentle
high end rise around 9-10 kHz. As such
it is a forward-sounding microphone, but
not crisp and bright like many "12 kHz
and up up UP" modern condensers.
Philip has not published graphs or specs
for Mabel, as most of his mics are handtuned by ear, but I assume Mabel also
offers a 150 ohm impedance and has a
self-noise figure not too far from Edwina's
22 dBA. To my ear, the two were pretty
similar. While not as low-noise as many
mass-produced modern PCB-based mics,
Mabel's noise floor is still lower than that of
many vintage mics and their clones.

Recording - August 2014

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