J.J. Blair wrote on Wed, 24 October 2007 13:56 |
... I hate to use esoteric descriptions such as "warmth" and "color," but those are the reasons I reach for a tube mic rather than a FET.
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As some of you know, I've been deep into trying to improve U87 fet mics for a long time. Once you eliminate Neumann's electronic circuit mess, and also equip the mic with a better transformer, and a high headroom FET, I find this "FET Sound" no longer to be an issue. Oliver Archut helped me take my work over yet another hump- one I was dissatisfied with in all U87s, and one that kept the mic in the "FET" sounding camp in the past. Yet, with a scaled-back high frequency extension, and a lot of work, I now have to say: A well prepped U87 equals a U67 in the "warmth" department.
With other words: I shared J.J.'s opinion for a long time, but with advanced age (worse hearing?) and better mod methods, I have now come to the conclusion that warmth (I call it emotional attraction) is not an exclusive of tube mics, but is largely determined by circuit implementation and quality of components (assuming, the same capsule is used as in the tube mic it is being compared to).
Please remember: FET mics came onto the field at a time when even tube mics began to decline: ever more bells, whistles, and "frequency compensations" of all kinds where added, and started to dilute the original purity of the old, elegant tube mics. And FET mics took off from there, with yet still more garbage in the signal chain.
The one area where the single FET mic will always do more poorly is high sound pressure. Yet, even your comment of how harmonic distortion is being processed differently between a FET and a tube mic (f. ex. recording a nicely overdriven Selmer amp with EL84s) is minimized, if not eliminated, if your FET mic:
a. stays within safe SPL's
b. uses a superb capsule, signal path, circuit, and components