Ok, I guess in the interest of avoiding the mountain of work I've got to do, I'll chime in here on this. Probably I'll just be muddying the waters and it definitely is coaching from the bench (since I'm personally not looking for AKG actives at the moment, just recently put those aside to try out the Milabs). Bottom line, take this all with a grain of salt and perhaps a means of get folks to re-focus and re-define what the hope is.
1) on the open nature of the project: I think the open exchange of ideas on this has been great, but I expect that to really make it happen, it'll need to proceed as a private, for-profit venture. As Freelunch said in another thread, this still is a big undertaking (with another chunk of time needed in the future for product support). If it was going to be completed to fruition as some kind of grassroots, ground up effort, it probably would have happened by now. A lot of time and effort is probably required to do this, and people will be more interested in investing that time if they can reap some benefits to their efforts. I'd imagine that would apply to Jerry of Aerco or whoever else took this on.
2) As to expected price, Freelunch had mentioned $1500, and that ballpark might be a pretty reasonable amount for a 2ch pair, including ck61 caps, active cables, and active system/box/mic bodies. Maybe the system could be as low as $1000, but with AKG ck6x cap pairs at about $350, that only allows $650 for the customized active system, which might not be that much (compare to somewhat custom Aerco preamps, jklabs boxes, nbox, etc). Certainly, I wouldn't expect it to be cheap, though it could be a lower cost alternative to even used Neumann, DPA, or schoeps systems.
3) On the reverse engineering thing: I wouldn't think it would be necessary. Plenty of good information has already been exchanged here, plus there is plenty information available online on mic systems and electronics. Plus Jerry at Aerco is pretty clearly a bright guy -- so what's to be gained from reverse engineering? Really, I think most of the knowledge on how to do this is out there, just need to figure out the mechanics, product packaging, design testing and debugging, etc.
4) The circuit-type people need to chime in here, but I suspect that it won't be possible to just make active cables and use the existing 480 bodies. (If nothing else, if it were this easy, AKG would probably have already done it.) Based on the architecture of my Milab actives, my old Neumann km140 actives, and what I've seen of schoeps actives, the system needs more than just a signal(+phantom) and ground connection that the 480s have (ie, two conductor connection). The other actives mentioned have a 4 conductor connection (for audio signal, ~60v bias, ~9v, and ground -- really guessing here, but it is something like this).
If this is the case, you'll need active electronics at the mic capsule end and also additional active electronics at the mic body end -- all of which can (will) color the sound to some extent. Adding the necessary electronics at the mic body side and still keeping the mic bodies to me in no ways insures that the signature sound of the AKG system will remain the same, perhaps no moreso than just replacing the 480 bodies with the necessary system you need for the active architecture. I guess what I'm saying here is I think a jklabs type box is the easier (and perhaps better) solution, and it doesn't mean that it will change the nature of the AKG sound any more than adding the necessary electronics to the 480 bodies will.
5) My out there idea: maybe someone who has a good relationship with Jon at jklabs can convince him to go into business with Jerry at Aerco or Chris Church to market these. Jon provides the R&D and engineering design, Jerry/Chris supplies the manufacturing and business/marketing. (Perhaps this is where the argument for reverse engr comes in, but I don't really like the idea, plus I don't think it will be enough to get the project done.) I do believe most of the knowledge is out there for making these systems, but that still means there will need to be a lot of product development which Jon has already done. IIRC, the ECMS-22 jklabs system I had was so numbered, since it was the 22nd system Jon built, with the first 21 designs having some type of flaws that needed to be corrected.
Anyway, there's the large ramble. By no means meant to deflate anyone's hopes -- I really hope my points might somewhat re-invigorate people's thinking on this so that the active system will actually get built. (Ok, perhaps just a bit of regret for selling my system to Tommy.
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Topic: The AKG Active Project - 2 (Read 98789 times)