I will probably regret this, but let me try to inject just a few (shudder, gasp) facts into this discussion. I suspect that many of the other people in this thread are too young to remember what things were like in the 1970s and 80s. I'm not; I was already buying and using AKG and Neumann and Schoeps condenser microphones for concert recording in the early 1970s, so I lived through all these developments first-hand.
First of all, Schoeps invented and patented the technology of active extension devices such as cables, goosenecks and extension tubes. As an example of the prior state of the art, consider Neumann's extension goosenecks for the KM 83/84/85 (see picture attached below), which were nothing more than a single wire encased in a metal tube. These were lovely to look at but limited in their usefulness due to unavoidable risks of interference, high-frequency losses and distortion. AKG had something similar for their C 451 series, with a built-in swivel as I recall. So the state of the art was basically rigid, passive extensions that were quite limited in length and that brought a real risk of degrading the sound quality.
Schoeps' patented design overcame these problems by placing an active FET stage at the head end of the cable, gooseneck or extension tube. (This meant that the extension accessory also had to have wires in it for capsule polarization voltage and for the DC to operate the FET circuit.) Under the RF conditions of the time, suddenly it was practical to use extension cables as long as 100 feet, though nowadays that would be avoided since the RF environment is so much more intense. TV broadcast engineers and film/video sound recordists particularly loved this system, but the fact is, most customers bought the microphones for their quality as microphones, and didn't know or care about the active extensions. That's important when you're trying to suss out the economics. (So is the patent, which people nowadays tend to forget.)
Schoeps introduced the only microphone series that could use active accessories, the CMC ("Colette") series, in late 1973. It was ten years (!) before anyone found (in effect) a way around the patent--the first thing that could be called a "competing product" was the Neumann KMF 4, a nice small cardioid with a passive extension cable that couldn't be removed (you always had to mount the capsule and the body separately). At around the same time AKG also came out with a set of electret capsules that could be attached to their C 460-series amplifiers, but those clearly weren't their best capsules, nor is it altogether clear (to me at least, as a non-attorney) whether that was an infringing design or not--it's right at the water's edge. At any rate, neither product got terribly far in the market and both were soon withdrawn. In effect, for about 15 years Schoeps had the entire field of studio microphones with active accessories to themselves. The Neumann KM 100 series wasn't introduced until 1988--again, based on passive extension accessories but with active capsules. That approach gets the job done, but makes the capsules much more expensive than they would otherwise have to be (for the majority of customers who don't use extension accessories).
Contrary to remarks in this thread, there was no particular economic incentive for Schoeps to develop "proprietary" connectors such as the ones used by Colette extension cables. For one thing the whole scheme was patented, so there was no legal way (without a license agreement) for any third parties to manufacture equipment that might have interfaced with Schoeps' amplifiers and capsules; thus Schoeps' choice of a connector wouldn't have been any barrier for such a third party. It's just basic reality that ALL manufacturers use their own choice of connectors for their capsules and amplifiers--you can't screw an AKG C 451 capsule onto a Neumann KM 84 body or vice versa.
As to overall pricing: The predecessor series at Schoeps, which continued in production and was only gradually phased out over a period of years, was the CMT series. According to the factory price lists from this period of time, the prices of the new Colette series amplifiers and capsules look as if they were about 10% higher than the prices for the corresponding earlier microphones. And that was in a period of considerable price inflation world-wide. In other words, Schoeps had always been very high-priced and remained so; they hardly raised their prices at all with the introduction of the Colette series, even though they were offering exclusive technology which caused their sales volume to increase considerably.
The majority of their customers weren't using active accessories, so there was economic pressure from less expensive competitors (including Neumann) all along, as usual. Besides, in an international market one manufacturer can't raise prices arbitrarily, because that plus the variations in exchange rates (this all being before the Euro existed) would cause a total choke-off of sales in some countries, and an increase in "grey marketing" (a big concern back then). The 1970s were years of tremendous variations in the exchange rate between the dollar and the Deutsche Mark, the U.S. distributor took a rather high mark-up on all microphones sold here, and there can be absolutely no doubt that Schoeps' very high prices slowed the growth of their sales in the U.S., where Dr. Schoeps (who was still alive then) had very much wanted them to expand. This was compounded by the U.S. distributor's long-time lack of interest in setting up dealerships--he as an individual directly sold all Schoeps microphones in the entire country, until after many years he was finally persuaded by Schoeps to allow a few other companies to become dealers.
This may be far more information than anyone here wanted to know, but I'm posting it just to show that the kind of inference and speculation that hobbyists commonly indulge in (and that this particular thread keeps coming back to again and again) is NOT a royal road to the truth. The truth is more complicated than what most people generally like to suppose, and it contains all sorts of details that no one would ever guess.
--best regards
Topic: Continuing KM184 discussion (Read 14362 times)