What started several years ago as a one-off microphone to replace the legendary Neumann KM-84 in our personal studio, the Methods & Applications Laboratory, quickly turned into several (expensive) rounds of prototypes that were tested, rejected, tweaked, tested again, rejected again... Maybe it's because we kept trying the damned things on HI-HATS. I digress... It got to a point where we had almost a dozen different builds using slightly different circuits, transformers, FETs, capsule surrounds and vents -- lots of different combinations of everything and anything. A handful of them were quiet as a mouse and had amazing headroom but sounded very boring, almost like a completely unseasoned meal. A larger handful of them had great tone but sounded very strange off-axis or were too noisy for use in digital recording. But one of these mics in particular took our shop's "bench test" guitar (a middle-of-the-road Baby Taylor) and made it sound like a real fine instrument. The inherent plastic brightness of the guitar turned into silk and sex. Rich, deep lows were heard in the monitors that didn't exist in the room. Everyone in the building heard what it did, loved it, and we all turned to each other at once as if to silently say "Hah! That's the one!" It didn't take long to make a couple final tweaks for a little extra high frequency "air" and run that microphone through the gamut -- grand piano, drum overheads, and yes, the mega-evil hi-hat. We'd spent a small fortune and an insane amount of hours developing this microphone, so we came to a group decision to give the thing a model number and figure out how to put it into production. That microphone is the Mercenary Audio Manufacturing "KM-69" and as of today, there are hundreds of them around the world being used by everyone from weekend warriors with home setups, to major label bands on tour, and even a few high profile commercial studios. |
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Shipping Weight: 4lbs | | Shipping Weight: 8lbs |
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