Topic: Schoeps cmd 42?

[Swanny]

The schoeps cmd 42 is mic body with aes 42 output. Has anyone been lucky enough to be a beta tester here? It puts out one "raw channel and one adjusted to your settings. It looks interesting how it can work with older caps and kc5's. You can add a chip to your caps to adjust for different years of manufacturing, like to add a db to make them match. Not sure they would be best for what we do, but very interesting.

[jerryfreak]

many have been waiting for the successor to the CMD-2U.

as of now there is limited advantage for our application, perhaps the most obvious ones are in the DSP field, but you would need to upgrade your capsules for maximum compatibility (if thats an option)

as far as the noise argument, it is similar to the 32-bit float trend, while better on paper, it offers little advantage for our application as the microphone amplifier itself is not generally the limiting factor. the charts they show are a bit deceiving. As we typically use 20-40 dB gain with an amplifier, you can see we are already in the "sweet spot" for dynamic range

Digital mics didnt really take off the first time around, difficult to understand how well these will be accepted as standards. Very few options for AES42 at the current time

IIRC, the CMD-2U didnt support both AES modes

[DSatz]

The existence of the beta test is public information, but everyone in it has had to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

I'm told that those data chips can be retrofitted to existing capsules without requiring complete disassembly; I don't know if the specifics of that procedure have been settled yet, though. In any event if you know the difference in sensitivity between your capsules, you can set the gain of the amplifiers accordingly. That doesn't depend on any chips; it's standard AES42 interface capability. Still, the chip approach is cool especially if you're running many microphones at the same time, e.g. for a multi-miked orchestra recording.

jerryfreak, what digital microphones generally aim to do is convert while adding the least possible amount of noise. With the CMD 42 the noise floor (on a dB SPL-equivalent basis) is about 1 dB greater than the same capsule would have with a CMC 1 or CMC 6. You would almost certainly lose more than that in any external preamp and A/D converter unless they happened to be optimized damn near perfectly for one another, for the noise floor of that microphone (which varies by capsule type), and for the maximum signal levels in that recording situation. That mostly never happens in the real world, so the digital mike would normally win by some amount--not necessarily a large amount, of course, since it's rare that the dynamic range of a modern condenser microphone is fully exploited in any one recording situation. Still, I wish I'd had a pair of these when I was recording percussion ensembles in the 1980s.

--The CMD 42's noise floor is audibly lower than the CMD 2's. You're right that the CMD 2 supported AES42 mode 1 only; the receiving interface has to convert the sampling rates if multiple mode-1 microphones are used simultaneously. But the CMD 42 also handles mode 2, in which the receiving interface uses control signals to nudge each microphone to a common sampling rate. No asynchronous conversion is required that way--thus saving a further dB or two of noise, in the rare event that the sound source is quiet enough to expose the microphone's noise floor.

And agreed, with industry-wide support for AES42 being almost certainly less than its initiators had hoped, Schoeps' investment in this project is a remarkable choice. But it's the kind of thing that can happen far more readily in a small, independent, privately-owned company than in a branch of a conglomerate that's responsible to a board of directors.

--best regards

[0vu]

And agreed, with industry-wide support for AES42 being almost certainly less than its initiators had hoped, Schoeps' investment in this project is a remarkable choice. But it's the kind of thing that can happen far more readily in a small, independent, privately-owned company than in a branch of a conglomerate that's responsible to a board of directors.

I noticed earlier this year that Neumann seem quietly to have dropped all their digital offering, including the KMD series. The KK series capsules remain available but only the KMA analogue body is still listed, with the KMDs showing under "Historical Microphones".

They announced in April 2020 that last orders were to be 31st July 2020 and full discontinuation would be when stocks were exhausted with the mics being officially no longer part of the Neumann range from 2021 but I missed the news and was surprised to see them vanish.

[DSatz]

Yes, Neumann discontinued all their AES42 digital microphones, interfaces and control software last year. Their parent company, Sennheiser, similarly discontinued the MZD 8000 digital output module, leaving their flagship MKH 8000 series analog-only (as is Neumann's KM series now). To what extent this decision was made for Neumann by the parent company, I don't know--but it seems rather inevitable that Neumann's and Sennheiser's digital product lines, which had vital elements in common, would rise or fall together. Corporate consolidation giveth, but corporate consolidation also taketh away.

The situation at Schoeps is somewhat different because of the the company's independence and small scale, the particular attitudes of its owner and its leadership, and the fact that its main series of microphones is modular. When the pandemic arrived, the owner (Mr. Ulrich Schoeps, the son of the co-founder) made clear that he wanted to keep everyone employed and to continue all developments that were underway at the company. Meanwhile the entire audio industry ground to a near-halt, and for a while there were very few orders. But then sales came roaring back, and Schoeps has had to work quite hard lately to catch up with fresh demand.