Focus: Microphones
Focus: Mircrophones While the paradigms for mic design shift very little on a year to year basis, trends do reveal themselves. For the last couple of years, ‘Spoken Word’, the second coming of the podcast and the rise of streaming has been the fuel behind the marketing and many of the new models we’ve seen. Thus, it was interesting last year to examine our picks of the vocal mic market, and as this year has seen both the refinement and the remixing of the accepted classics, as well as a raft of options at lower price points looking to appeal to new talents entering the market, it’s a well we have no qualms going back to these incremental developments and loweing of price points have been the standard model for how the industry tides have been turning for a good few decades now, and no-doubt will be the model for a while to come. So, for 2022’s mic guide we’ve once again looked at our pick of our favourite players in the space, and taken an overview of the market to pick out some new and classic models we think represent great options for voice recording.
AEA
AKG
If it’s sheer beauty you want in a vocal mic, you’ll struggle to beat the R44, but what you’ll also get is a replica of the classic RCA 44BX ribbon mic, with its signature figure-8 pattern — with up to 90dB of rejection at 90o, and ever-warming sound when its gets within around a metre from the vocalist. If you’ve ever seen a classic radio or TV broadcast from the US on TV or film, you’ve probably seen the mic on which the R44 is based, and you’ve certainly heard the results its produced on any number of classic songs and voices. Interestingly, the ‘44 concept is delivered in five different flavours by AEA, the R44C is the purest form, and closest to the original, with the A440 being the top-of-the-line ‘ultra premium’ iteration offering a custom Lehle transformer, RPQ JFET preamp, active electronics requiring phantom power, and the X motor hotrod that offers an additional 18dB of output and greater flexibility with different preamps. The R44CX version offers a mechanical route to higher outputs that utilises a modified R44 transducer with two additional magnets, providing an extra 6db of output. There are also CE and CXE ‘cost effective’ iterations, which use different materials for the enclosure.
AKG’s flagship C12 VR, a name that harks back to the 50s is not cheap — then again it is the company’s top-of-the-line offering, a tube-powered mode that accepts its esoteric appeal and revels in it. Changes made to the internal design of the VR reissue were not to the liking of everyone, we note, and irked many purists. Last year, we picked out the C414 XLII as our tip for vocals; all 60s ‘diamond’ a la the C12A, with some of that model’s sonic fingerprint too and that presence boost in the mids to sweeten vocals. At the other end of the company’s range sits the Lyra USB2-connected model for podcasters, content creators and musicians. The system, capable of recording at 24-bit/192kHz in cardioid (‘front’) and Omni (@1kHz, what the company calls ‘front and back’), with additional ‘narrow’ and ‘wide’ stereo modes, garnered the company a NAMM TEC award last year — which puts the model towards the front of a very, very competitive market race, at an extremely attractive price point for anyone doing desktop recording or in need of an inexpensive, flexible, simple to set-up option to stick in a kit bag or send out to remote talent. Looks good on camera, too.
www.aearibbonmics.com
www.akg.com
R44
44 / March/April 2022
C414 XLII & Lyra
