Well spoken, Oliver!
Here's another thought:
The old classics are beyond doubt excellent microphones and very long-lasting and popular workhorses in the studio.
Problem is, this is in fact not necessarily a good thing if you wish to make money on selling microphones...
What I'm saying is, if a guy buys a microphone that he's happy with for the rest of his life (and for most of his recording applications) his not very likely to replace that one, ever...
I'm all for developing things further and there have been many improvements in microphone design over the last fifty years. Sad thing is that these improvements are almost without exception technically excellent while musically pointless...
As an example, who needs a microphone with lower self noise than the U-47? I certainly can't think of a situation where that would have been the case for me. In fact, most microphones make more noise anyway.
Back to the idea of running a microphone business, if there are no major improvements to be made to the actual sound of a microphone, we're stuck with trying to improve measured values and other features like size, portability, color etc...
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Now, there are many other aspects of this discussion, one of them being that the old classics are not really available anymore, at least not in the numbers and condition we would wish, so I really feel that it's time to move on, because fact is, for great recordings of great music we need great mikes!
Martin