Recording - November 2015 - 72

What's (no longer) In A Name?

Guest editorial by Scott Dorsey
We hear a lot today about preservation
of intellectual property rights in the digital
age, but mostly what we hear about is the
preservation of the art itself. I think we
need to worry just as much about the
preservation of design property.
Back in the 18th century, the concept of
intellectual property in the West was a
very vague one; even Paul Revere
engraved and sold copies of well-known
artworks. Design modifications were
copied freely. For the most part, this came
to an end with the Industrial Revolution,
when it became possible to make copies
of everything much more rapidly.

You can't just blame the Chinese either.
The British company that was the official
importer of the Russian Oktava mics
decided, for various reasons, that it could
get the Chinese to make them cheaper.
So the importer had made a large number of Chinese duplicates of all the standard Oktava microphones, then sold
them in the US and UK. In some cases
they are even mixed and matched-I
went to one retailer and saw an Oktava
MK-012 set that had two Russian capsules, one Chinese capsule, a Russian 10
dB pad, and Chinese electronics.
The factory in Russia was incensed,
and the importer claimed ownership of
the name "Oktava" and said that it could
have its microphones made anywhere it
wanted. The end result of all this is dilution of the Oktava name; if you call an
imitation (especially an imperfect imitation) by the name of the original, ultimately neither benefits. It seems that no
matter who is right, nobody will win.
Another famous example is the name
"Pultec." The original Pultec equalizers

to use them, because of the effect that the
modern copies don't have. Once again,
the name had been diluted.
I suppose that to some extent this is
inevitable, as older generations of equipment stop being daily workhorses that are
actually being used by engineers, and
become rarities that are preserved for
posterity. Too many RCA ribbon mics
have ended up in glass cases where they
are treated as objects of respect and veneration, rather than something to actually
put up in front of a vocalist.
Yes, you could harm that precious old
microphone if you took it out of the case...
but that is the risk you take when you actually use something, and these products
were designed to be used, not to sit in a
museum. Sadly, nowadays they are all too
often being replaced by, and being confused with, replicas that were designed to
look nice in a glass case rather than sound
good in a studio. It's a terribly backwards
situation, and it all comes from letting original designs, and the cachet that goes with
their names, be diluted by poor imitations.

When someone claims, "Just like the original"... find out how true that is.
China today is undergoing an industrial
revolution, and its notion of design property
is a very tenuous one. In Shanghai, there are
a number of microphone factories, mostly
employing people trained at the large government-owned factory there and using
designs that originated at that factory. As
you'll note from my 2002 "Shanghai Mike"
article (http://is.gd/RECMakingMicsBetter),
the products of these factories are often identical, and are sold under a lot of different
names by different importers in the US.
When design modifications are brought
to these factories, soon they are spread to all
the others. For example, one vendor developed a transformerless electronics package
that was really quite ingenious, and took the
design to its factory in Shanghai. Within a
few months, other factories were selling the
same microphone with the same circuit in it.
One US importer is selling a microphone which has the name of a competitor on its PC board. How did this happen? It could be that the factory copied a
board part-for-part, including the name,
or that the same factory makes mics for
both companies and doesn't bother
retooling between runs. We'll probably
never know; much of what happens in
those factories is veiled in mystery.
72

RECORDING November 2015

did something very interesting due to the
construction of the filter inductors-the
center frequencies of the filters change
with signal level. Although this was originally an unwanted byproduct of using
cheap inductors, it turned out to be a
powerful and useful musical tool; it's what
makes a Pultec a Pultec.
Fast forward fifty years, and everybody
and his brother are selling a "Pultec" or
"Pultec-style" equalizer. They all use the
original Pultec circuit topology, but most
of them don't use the same inductor
design, so they don't have the same
effect. In most cases, these are being
made without the knowledge or permission of the original trademark holders.
Until the revival of Pulse Techniques
(whose equalizers I admit I have not yet
tried), Manley Laboratories was the only
company that has ever got permission to
use the "Pultec" name... and even the
Manley Pultec doesn't sound the same as
the original.
I worked with someone recently who
talked about how he didn't like Pultec
equalizers. It turned out that he'd never
heard a real Pultec, he'd only heard the
modern copies. When he heard the real
thing, he understood why people wanted

I hate to see this dilution happen, and I
can only see it accelerating as more
designs are given names they don't
deserve. Your only defense against being
caught in this trap yourself is to be educated. When a company sells something
that it claims is "just like the original," do
some homework in this magazine or
online and find out just how true that is.
Better still, find a studio that has the original in it, rent some time, and work with it
yourself to learn its tricks.
If you then try an imitation and hear the
same sonic result, you can congratulate
yourself on having made an informed
decision. If you try an imitation and discover that it's a mockery of the original,
you've saved your money, learned what
to avoid, and perhaps more importantly
in the long run, you've heard what made
the original great in the first place.
Scott Dorsey (dorsey@recordingmag.com)
is an electrical engineer, software engineer,
and recording engineer, working in the
Williamsburg, VA area. He's probably several other kinds of engineer too... we
wouldn't be surprised to learn that he could
drive a train.

http://www.is.gd/RECMakingMicsBetter

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