(Folks, I set out to shorten this article but ended up making it about three times the original size. Hmmm ...)
I think Schoeps, Neumann and AKG are the most interesting cases. They have all offered a range of different microphone types. After World War II when it became feasible to build small condenser microphones with full professional quality, Schoeps went in that direction exclusively while Neumann and AKG kept a foot in both camps. Then in the mid-1950s when it became feasible to build small condenser microphones with interchangeable capsules, all three companies offered them but none of the three offered them exclusively, i.e. all three companies also sold complete microphones which did not have interchangeable capsules.
To understand the manufacturers' dilemma, let's try to roll back some of the self-selecting nature of this forum. The kind of recording that most of us do most of the time is "location" recording--which is an important segment of the market for some audio equipment manufacturers, but it's a specialty segment, and we are typically individuals who lack multi-million-dollar equipment budgets, alas. Some of the (capitalistically) largest areas of the audio equipment market don't sell to location recordists at all, or hardly at all. Even microphones, viewed "from above" as a business, are sold in far larger quantities for use in fixed installations and for recording/broadcast studios.
The thing is, some people just don't "get" modularity--and it seems that that group includes many of the people who buy equipment for U.S. recording and broadcast studios. They don't want to hear about separate capsules and amplifiers; they feel that the manufacturer should put the microphone together. They know what a "57" is and what an "87" is, they imagine that they know what a "414" is, and they like things that way. (Never mind that the U 87 has three directional patterns--to a typical studio guy all professional microphones are cardioids, and the pattern switch is at best a kind of tone control. Never mind that there have been over a dozen models of "C 414" with three very different, and different-sounding, capsules that the company calls by the same name.)
So this is a tricky situation for the manufacturers. Marketing-wise they need a very clear identity for their microphones--but where they have versatility to offer, they want that to be clear as well, and those two aims clash. The greater the versatility, the greater the potential for confusion.
Going back to my three companies as examples: Neumann had their KM 83/84/85 (omni/standard cardioid/speech cardioid), with interchangeable capsules sharing the same electronics, and the KM 84 way outsold the other two models combined; for most users your purposes would pretty much dictate which capsule you chose. But some interchanging did occur, and as a result, you might see a microphone engraved as a "KM 83", but if it had a KK 84 cardioid capsule head on it, it was functionally a KM 84. Eventually Neumann decided to let the Wookiee win, and stopped engraving specific model numbers on that series of microphone bodies--instead they just said "KM 80" while the capsules were given clearer markings so that people could easily tell which one was on a given body.
AKG had their C 451 series, which (unlike the modern "re-issue") was modular, had more different capsules than Neumann, and had alternate bodies for the same capsules--one optimized for 48-Volt phantom powering, and another one with pad and low-cut switches built in. But AKG didn't have any particular names for complete microphones that were made up of these parts. So again you still find people (especially in studios) referring to "a 451" as if that really identified the mike, even though that name fails to identify the part which really determines the sound of the microphone.
In the 1960s Schoeps' best-known microphones were the M 221 B series, which had interchangeable capsules, but the microphones were engraved and sold as M 221 B "with" a certain capsule. "M 221 B/M 934 B" was thus one of the more common types--a name that hardly rolls off the tongue. In the early 1970s Schoeps' main series was the CMT 30/40/50 series, which supported three different powering methods (phantom 12 Volts, parallel 12 Volts and phantom 48 Volts). There were seven or eight capsule types available, and the two 12-Volt microphone series could interchange capsules with one another. Capsules for the 48-Volt microphones were built in a subtly different way but could be physically placed on the 12-Volt amplifiers and vice versa, and they would work although not in an ideal way. The thing is, the company didn't emphasize the interchangeability of capsules or amplifiers (although if done properly, it worked very well), and the microphones were still being engraved and sold as complete microphones with capsule-specific markings (e.g. my original pair of Schoeps mikes say "CMT 56U").
When Schoeps' present-day Colette series was introduced in 1973-74, one of its leading points was the wide selection of "combinable" capsules and amplifiers. But Schoeps also wanted the users of their existing CMT 30/40/50 series to think of the Colette microphones as a kind of continuation of the CMT series with improvements (an early version of "friends with benefits," I suppose). So for a few more years, Schoeps continued the practice of concatenating the amplifier and capsule names. For example, a CMC 3-- amplifier with an MK 41 capsule on it would be ordered and sold as a "CMC 341", at least on paper.
The attached picture file shows part of a 1970s brochure for the Colette series in which this approach was still being used. However, the whole essence of an interchangeable capsule system is that the microphone isn't defined by the capsule that it happens to be using at the moment; it's defined more by its potential to have any of (for Schoeps by now) over 20 different capsule types on it. So the engraving on the amplifier said "CMC 3--" or "CMC 4--" or "CMC 5--" with the dashes meaning "fill in the blanks" with the capsule's designation. Eventually the whole name-concatenation approach fell by the wayside, and Schoeps stopped pushing it.
--best regards
Topic: "Preferred" way to list a multi-cap mic in gear chain? (Read 5800 times)