jerryfreak, quite frankly I'm not going to read all that. But as I said earlier, one of the two product lines that you mentioned is an active cable system. People here use capsules on active cables as if they were complete microphones, because they also use custom electronics that contain enough back end amplifier circuitry for ultra-compact location recording. That's great--but Schoeps' claim was explicitly about studio microphones--a category that's spelled out in great detail in the DIN and IEC standards. The front end (alone) of an active cable system simply doesn't meet the definition.
As you may know, Schoeps invented, and for many years held the patent on, active cables and other active accessories. For a while they even sold Colette active cables that were divided in the middle, with Lemo connectors so that (passive) extensions could be used, or special components such as the Colette active 4:1 mixer that had Lemo sockets for its inputs. They also sold a lavalier mike (CM 03 L) and instrument mikes (CM 02 L) that contained active circuitry and terminated in the same type of Lemo connector (incidentally, not the same Lemo connector they use today, to which I say, "fortunately"--the old ones were finicky and came apart too easily). Anyway they obviously were perfectly well aware of such arrangements and their usefulness in special situations.
Yet Schoeps never claimed that an MK capsule on a KC (Colette) extension cable was "the world's smallest studio condenser microphone". They did, however, make precisely that claim 20 years later when they introduced the CCM series. And as far as I'm concerned, they were right both times.
(Full disclosure: In some of the early Colette series literature the term "miniature microphone" was used to describe a capsule on a Colette cable--and I always felt that that usage was wrong simply on logical grounds. Apparently it came from the French broadcasters, who were also the first to call the CMMT-series remote capsule arrangement "a Colette", years before the actual Colette series was created--and since Mr. Wuttke was Schoeps' primary contact with the French market as well as being the chief engineer of the company AND back then, the person who wrote their sales literature (!), it crept into all their writing. -- But to the best of my knowledge they never said "miniature studio microphone" when referring to that arrangement, and if they had done so, in my opinion that would have been really wrong. Again, when a German manufacturer says "studio microphone" then they are tying themselves to the DIN standard for studio microphones. We Americans are more used to throwing terms around as if they mean whatever we want them to mean, but it's no casual matter for a German manufacturer.)
--Again I don't know how many times I have posted in this forum that an "active" extension device (cable, etc.) isn't just anything that goes between the capsule and amplifier of a condenser microphone. Rather, an "active" extension component is so called because it contains active circuitry, i.e. it has gain (current and/or voltage) and requires a power supply. The main component in most active accessories is a FET plus the resistors around it that bias it, or perhaps a chip that amounts to the same thing. This is primarily an impedance transformer, i.e. it accepts the signal from the capsule (with its extremely high output impedance, especially at low frequencies) and amplifies its current. This enables the signal to travel down the extension cable with far less risk of signal losses (which may be frequency-dependent) or interference than if the active circuitry weren't there. (Passive / non-active extensions, which typically have those problems if there's no active circuitry in front of them, have been available for nearly as long as condenser microphones have been on the market.)
However, in the Schoeps design, it was always assumed that the main portion of the amplifier would be on the other end of that extension cable, which would further amplify the current and provide a low-impedance, balanced output as required of a studio microphone. The extension cables, etc., in the Schoeps system are at a "low-ish" impedance (several hundred Ohms) rather than a truly low impedance, and they are unbalanced. So again, the fact that people here chop the cables in half and use them with third-party gear is irrelevant to what category the original product, as designed and produced by its manufacturer, falls into. And I really wish that you would keep that in mind when you raise your arguments.
By the way, the DIN/IEC standards call for a balanced output circuit, but balance is defined as equal output impedance on the two modulation leads. It doesn't require that they be symmetrically driven or that they both be driven at all. That's usually unimportant in the studio environment that the standards are concerned with. In that world, the responsibility is on the receiving input to respond in "differential mode" rather than "common mode"--and again, that requires only that the impedances be the same. If a balanced output had to be symmetrically driven, then none of Neumann's transformerless microphones for the past 25+ years could be considered "studio microphones", for example, which is ridiculous.
--best regards
Topic: on-line "Sound Summit" this morning (Oct. 2) (Read 2384 times)