R/E/P > Klaus Heyne's Mic Lab

Neumann U67 Reissue: Complete Tear Down and Analysis

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RuudNL:
Funny that people (think to) hear a difference between different cables. When I was still working for a radio station, we had two kinds of cable from the same manufacturer. One kind was black, the other kind gray. A colleague claimed that the gray cable sounded 'better' and even hid cables when he had to make an important recording the next day.
My idea: he had once made a good recording and used gray cables. From that moment on, he was convinced that the success was due to the gray cables...

klaus:
I cannot comment on the specific case you cite, but do not underestimate the role a dye in the cable jacket can make in affecting the electrical properties of a cable.

RuudNL:
What could be an explanation that the outer jacket of the cable could affect the audio quality?
The outer jacket lies outside the shielding layer, so no effect could be expected from this.
(This reminds me a bit of people buying an expensive cable between their CD player and the amplifier; low output impedance, high input impedance, resistance and capacitance of the cable are negligible. And yet people who buy a $100+ cable, now called an 'interlink', -sounds more impressive-, say: "it sounds better now". I suppose they want to hear the money that is no longer in their wallet...)

klaus:
Jackets measurably affect capacitance, reactance and likely other, less obvious electrical parameters of an audio-carrying cable.

Without getting into the philosophy of perception vs. delusion, I can cite conversations with a major cable manufacturer who, after realizing the new jacket material was no longer amenable to the sound envisioned, reversed the jacket material to the previous design, dimension (and dying) and all was well again.

Paul Johnson:
Reading all this made me think. I am one of those who have 'trouble' with the flowery words used to describe audio, but here, I do understand what Klaus means because his pick of descriptive words does click in my brain. Clearly, he hears differences, and measurements fail to make sense with this study. The only issue is one of understanding. When any of us see a certain colour of blue, we have no way of determining if another viewer sees the same colour - we just call what we see, blue. Mine might be pink, who knows?  Here, the differences he hears make sense. The facts seem to be that there are differences, good ones and bad ones. Pointing the most critical ones out - as in the capsule and tube also makes sense. The sad bit is that Neumann give him a mic yet gave him one less good, as a re-issue. Surely they should have heard the same? The question is why did they not, as they didn't;t in the past with the capsule performance being 'in-spec' - what exactly does being in spec mean, if a less good one is technically OK?

As I said, I usually hate all those emotive words people use, but coming from an expert, they're actually OK, because they have context. 

It's a bit sad a prestige microphone that clearly could be wonderful didn't really get listened to by the manufacturer?

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