The process can go even further by using look-alike trademarks – whether to deceive or to emulate is a very hard question to answer – and on to wholesale copying of literature down to specifications and including frequency response graphs and polar diagrams.
Rather obviously, this is not only a simple breach of copyright but also a completely pointless exercise in that the paperwork cannot actually refer to the microphone that is sold at all.
Perhaps it fools a few of the uneducated, but if they remain in that state of ignorance for very long they don’t deserve to be included in the “professional” industry.
The next question must be to ask how much it matters. After all, there are many that would argue that a good copy of an old master is still a wonderful picture and has almost all the original qualities except the price tag.
Surely only a fool pays three times what he needs to for the same product?
Quality Costs
Of course, the product isn’t the same. It’s different for three distinct reasons.
First, two microphones may share the same shape but are less likely to share the same quality of machining or engineering.
It’s feasible for a good microphone to be assembled by cheap labor, but quality machine tooling, steel, brass and electrical components hold a remarkably consistent price throughout the world.
Consistency is the catchword of the second reason. Both the acoustic and electrical signals handled by microphones are vanishingly tiny.
To register them identically on two different microphones calls both for high precision in manufacture and also an accurate measurement regime that can detect differences and confirm compliance with a specification.
Third, the inexpensive product is unlikely to carry with it a great deal of engineering support, even at the time of sale, let alone 10 years later.
The transaction is more along the lines of a supermarket purchase – you’re expected to buy on the basis of the advertising brochure and the sympathetic magic of its looks rather than on appraised performance.
The description is likely to be long on the thickness of the gold plating of the diaphragm, the warmth of the “tube” sound and how great it sounds on anything from tambourines to tenors, but short on any meaningful or believable specifications and distinctly foggy on the physics.
In other words, the sort of microphone that you heave rather than grieve over at the first sign of trouble.
There is a more important reason why all of this matters, one that is far more serious than the comparison of details of a couple of microphones. As with the milk, so with the mic – we need to consider what the price distortions might eventually do to the market as a whole.
The cheap microphone can steal an advantage temporarily because it does not have to bear any of the longterm costs of “quality.” There is no requirement for a margin to be put aside for fundamental research, or to pay for the retention of highly experienced engineering staff, or to fund a servicing operation.
By contrast the expensive microphone must carry all these extra costs; which, of course, is why it’s expensive.
If the market is tilted heavily toward cheap products, then it becomes impossible to sustain the overall degree of profitability required to support a range of manufacturers providing the specialist designs.
And without customers prepared to pay the higher prices, microphone companies go bust just as easily as milk producers.