Yarr, 'tis a fine sort of thing to have and to do.

I still kind of feel like the Man wants too much for capsules and transformers though. Every time i start to look into a build, i am struck with the same sort of feeling.

Also, the general dearth of a/b comparisons with so much of the diy/mod mic stuff, kind of puts me off.

Meaning, for example, so many of the available DIY capsules are just (and usually this is not made immediately obvious to the buyer, or like, it is indeed basically completely obscured) manufactured in the same factories as the normal chinese mxl/etc that they supposedly sound so much better than. Maybe they do pull the nicest ones out of the bin and resell them for more because they are nicer. Or maybe there isn't that much between all of them really. A lack of anything more substantial than glowing studiophile reviews makes it difficult for me to tell exactly.

I dunno, the more i looked into this stuff, the more skeptical i started to feel. It ended up being sort of an interesting foil to the times when i started to read and learn about guitar amps and pedals. The mics and preamps folks get real commercial real quick, and definitely seem to reside way too close for comfort, mindset-wise, to the audiophile folks. Lot of fucking smoke and mirrors evidence abounds.

Quite frankly, it is probably a matter of: i simply do not trust a studiophile.

...Hmm, which was a cranky dude tangent pretty much?

Anyhow, for mic building, i kind of want to try to do a carbon mic.

Because i kind of want to record like it was the twenties or something.

I should probably just go back in and try to fix the telephone mic so that it works right though.

A law of diminishing returns definitely applies.

Some shit is definitely there, like, it just has that sound. And for a good part of it you're paying for the name. Part of it, too, is the modern recording paradigm where you're not passing through Everything Else, Too. Which IMO/IME contributes big time to the sound. Whatever direct --> computer is not ideal.

And guys who have expensive gear don't usually have comparable cheap gear either, so less likely to A/B a thing. Which sucks. Because I can damn well vouch for the fact the quality of the latter has improved exponentially since I started doing this shit.

I can say there's stuff that rocks and stuff that's meh, and some of what rocks is pricey and Does A Thing You Will Recognize. Some of what's cheap does what it should, and some of it more than. I've used pricey shit and used cheap shit. Like everything else, derived from context. I can tell you I would have been a lot more comfortable with my own gear and monitoring chain the other day attempting to track vocals. Or, at least, setting something up where I wouldn't have to be in and out in a couple hours. But that's going off into an entirely different discussion.

As an aside, there's this young kid with an 'audio production company':




Two weeks later, he's posing with pics of his new U87.

Sorry 'bout that. Gnar video!