Friday Featuritis – The Mic Modder Directory
Friday, July 4th, 2008 | by matthew mcglynn
Introducing The Mic Modder Directory
You probably own a couple inexpensive microphones — MXL, CAD, Nady, Oktava, ADK, Joemeek, and on and on — because if your mic cabinet was filled exclusively with Neumanns and Gefells and vintage AKGs you wouldn’t be reading this website. You’d be tracking 24×7 to pay the Visa bill.
And even if you do own a pile of high-end mics, you might be shopping for some low-cost alternatives, because who wants to put a $1500 tube condenser within stick’s reach of a drummer? At $60/hr for studio time, that’s a tough business.
But you can’t use a cheap mic too many times before you start wondering if it couldn’t be made a little better. You know the factories are taking shortcuts. They need to hit a price point, not impress Klaus Heyne. So while they’ve copied their basic circuits and designs from Neumann, Schoeps and RCA, they’ve tarnished the designs’ potential by using cheap tubes, low-fi capacitors, noisy transformers, and by not testing the finished products. Diaphragms are wrinkled, backplates are poorly machined, XLR connectors are wired out of phase, ribbons sag like last month’s Jell-o.
I contend that it’s not a huge leap of logic to go from “I’m buying a $99 mic that sounds pretty good” to “I’m upgrading my $99 mic so it sounds really good.”
It has always been a goal of the RecordingHacks Microphone Database to catalog all available mic mods. Today, we’re taking this mission one step farther: we’re cataloging the mic modders too.
Integration is at the microphone level. That means that each page in the microphone database lists all the mod and repair service providers right in the sidebar.
For example: see the Apex 460 mods and Oktava MK-012 mods.
We’re listing vintage-mic repair providers too; see the Neumann U47 page.
The homepage of the Mic Modder Directory lists the repair shops and modders for top-down browsing. Or jump to your favorite mics via the mic search engine to see what mods are available for your own mics.
Special thanks go out to Michael Joly of OktavaMod, Marik, Dave Thomas of Advanced Audio Microphones, Scott Hampton of Hamptone, and Terry Setter for their assistance in getting this directory off the ground!
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