Yeah!Larry Mal wrote: ↑Sun Apr 17, 2022 11:02 amI guess I'm going to resurrect this thread as I am intrigued by these Gefells, and likely still on the hunt for a great microphone to record vocals with since I do not think this U87 I bought on eBay is likely to happen. I'm not sure what the deal is there, but I don't think that microphone is coming.
So I guess I'd put the budget around $1100 and used is fine.
Brad, can you elaborate a little more on these and how you use them? I did some reading on the M7 capsules you mention, it seems that this is just about the lowest price point one would find this capsule according to this.
So here's the deal. There are three main things that I consider to have a whole lot of influence on the sound of a condenser mic. Roughly in order: capsule, active element(s), output/balancing transformer.
In the MT71, you have what many consider to be one of the 2-3 best-sounding center-terminated capsules ever designed/made (the K47/K49 and K67/K870 being the others). So that's pretty well-sorted, and is arguably the most important thing.
The active element is a simple FET amplifier, not worlds apart from what you might find in something like a U87. Is this the most magical, mystical way to turn an extremely weak, extremely high-impedance signal into a stronger, lower-impedance one? Nah, probably not. But nobody has any qualms with how a U87 or KM84 sounds, you know.
The output is active-balanced, which is another way of saying "transformerless." Transistors (sometimes discrete, sometimes integrated) replace the impedance-transformation function of the transformer.
As recently as the 1990s, this was considered a "high tech, improved" way to do things. Now that we have high-tech, improved recorders, it's become more fashionable to turn electricity into magnetism at least a couple of times to prevent things from sounding "sterile." This fashion could of course swing back the other way at any moment.
It's also fixed-cardioid, which cuts costs but is fine because an LDC generally sounds best in cardioid anyway. Summing two diaphragms in-phase is not the same as a true pressure omni, and summing them out-of-phase is not the same as a true velocity mic (figure 8 ). Who uses a U47 in omni, you know? Almost literally nobody. It's pretty "meh" in omni.
So the TL;DR: The MT71 gets the most important part right (the capsule), the second most-important part just fine (the active element), and sacrifices a bit of multipattern functionality and eschews a transformer on the output to save cost.
In my view, this is a MUCH better path to a good LDC than using a tube, a nice transformer, a fancy exterior, and the same $99 imported capsule everyone else uses.