How do you know what that resonance frequency is?

Very simple. I ping it. And I use a tuning fork. So if it sounds forward in the upper mids, and the resonance of the diaphragm is in the region of D sharp or E, I would say I could not do what I need to do by torquing the screws. I will need another diaphragm.

That’s surprising! How broad is the range of resonance frequencies?

It can be six or seven half tones, quite a bit. And you can’t control it much better than that. All of these go into ovens, that’s how they tension them. There’s still so much art, so much luck, in diaphragm manufacture. To a “t”, almost every capsule mimics something Neumann did in the late fifties. Look at any German or Chinese microphone, and you will find they all use the same basic principle. But we have changed some of that with the Brauner. I never liked some of the phase shift you get with these capsules. For example, you speak into the front of the microphone, the sound hits the front diaphragm, but because it is a cardioid and it goes by addition and subtraction, you get it by rear entry as well, but the rear entry is time delayed. But there are ways to minimize this. Neumann made a beautiful capsule, with almost zero time delay, the M49 capsule and the U47 capsule. It was incredible. But they didn’t have high frequencies, it topped out at about 14kHz. Even so, it had this wonderful relaxed, open, intimate thing that draws you in emotionally because it didn’t have phase shift. However, the 87 and 67 capsules have more sizzle, are more rock and roll, but they have more phase shift and are tiring over time. So Dirk had already invented something that I thought was genius, of how to combine the two issues. Then I went to work in the initial prototype stage, doing filing and drilling, testing, until we had it together.

I’m still surprised that, after all these years and all the technology, that this hasn’t been reduced to some kind of exact science.

Really, the question is, where do you take a machine with all this? Sure, with a TEF analyzer you can get a fancy graph, but what do you do with that information? It doesn’t get you anywhere as far as a useful tool. It doesn’t say, this is the situation and therefore you should do this and this. It doesn’t work that way. It’s a question of discriminating listening, of dealing with complex waveforms. None of these analyzers really do well with complex waveforms. They are all one trick ponies. You give them a sine wave and they show what it does through the spectrum. But hit it with something that has sibilants and sine waves and noise all at the same time, well, forget it. You have to use your ears. Does that make any sense to you?

Yes, very much so. In fact it’s parallel to what I’ve heard over the past decade, when dealing with low resolution digital when compared to really good analog.

Oh, yes, the difference is dramatic. I went to Lucasfilm, to a scoring stage one time, and they were doing a small orchestra, and they were simultaneously running a Stellavox recorder at 30ips and a very sophisticated digital setup with Cello converters. We listened back and forth between inputs and outputs on both machines. The collapse of the hall, of the ambience, was so dramatic in the digital domain. The high complexity of that hall was reduced to a smidgen. There was practically nothing left but direct signal.

In view of that, has the transition to digital affected you in terms of what people want from your microphones?

Yes, it has. The modifications I did fifteen years ago are now too bright. At the time, at the final stages of slaved 48-tracks, you needed so much high end to cut through the density and noise of all that. So they would boost high end on the board. But, not seeing into the future, I said, no, let me do it up front. There will be less noise and graininess if I do it in the microphone. Now I’m cringing that I ever did that, but people wanted it. So now, I counterbalance by moving toward the mellow, warm side, to work with the lack of mellowness digital has. I’ve gotten much more conservative. I assume now that they want much more than to be sizzled with high end. More and more I’m finding that you can get what you want by having more resolution. That’s the secret. With this Brauner microphone, it has so much resolution, there’s no EQ’ing in it. It’s all there.

At least we’re now moving toward a new 24-bit, 96kHz standard, which does offer significant improvement.

Really? I’ve been talking to some people in Neil Young’s organization, and they’ve been working at 192kHz and say that 96kHz stinks by comparison. So, do I care about it? Yes I do, if only because my modifications will be more appreciable in the final product, the higher resolution. I’m constantly working on new componentry that will give me higher resolution. And I’m trying everything. Recently somebody tried to sell me on this sidereal capacitor, and I’ll try it and listen to it. If it works, great. But I know it doesn’t always work as advertised. That MIT multicap was one example, with capacitors that were bypassing each other. It was supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread, but I plugged one in, it was a bunch of junk, it was bullshit. If you have confidence in your hearing, you can audition all these subcategories that can make your work better. Because remember, the weakest link in the chain dictates the resolution of the whole chain. So, for example, if I have shitty cabling from the capsule to the high impedance input of the microphone, there are losses. I have to solder new cables on and listen to how they sound different.

What do you think about these so-called digital microphones, with the conversion right there at the front end?

It all still depends on what you do with the analog components beforehand. And I was just thinking this morning, when you do that, you forfeit any further sound shaping in the analog domain. What about your favorite Neve flavor or API flavor? You can’t do that. You can’t stick it into an LA2A anymore, and do it in that domain. Sure, you can use a virtual LA2A. What’s more, what if they come out with a better converter? What will you do with this thing? This is the problem with companies, they feel they have to move forward, and moving forward seems to be putting more stuff in the signal chain. More often than not, this does not seem to result in a better sounding microphone.

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