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Gear / Technical Help => Microphones & Setup => Topic started by: deadheadcorey on January 15, 2009, 06:18:31 PM
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http://www.telefunkenusa.com/
anyone ever use any of these mics?
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http://www.archive.org/details/outformation2005-08-25.htp.flac16 >:D
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http://www.archive.org/details/outformation2005-08-25.htp.flac16 >:D
wow, sounds very very nice.....
they are pretty pricy though....
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...yeah and the ones used were ooooooold.
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For the record:
Telefunken was the brand used by AEG - formerly Germany's biggest manufacturer of all things electrical, from power stations and locomotives, industrial energy systems, radio and communications systems to electric household appliances - for their professional and domestic broadcast and communications equipment.
AEG has gone belly up, decades ago. Some parts of the communications division were taken over by Daimler-Benz Aerospace, later known as DASA. They still hold the rights to the Telefunken brand and everybody willing to pay can license it and put a Telefunken label on his produce. There are Telefunken washing machines made by Electrolux, Telefunken TV sets made by some Turkish firm, Telefunken digital picture frames made by God-knows-who, etc. etc. Along the same lines, someone in the U.S. has bought the right to put Telefunken labels on his microphones. No more, no less.
Ironically, the few renowned Telefunken condenser microphones from the olden days weren't even made by Telefunken, but where re-badged Neumann or AKG mics.
The same goes for a few other U.S-based operations selling their products as RFT (the state-run East-German electronics manufacturer in the 'good old' days of communist rule), Funkenwerk (now, that's a particularly good joke: the original company used to be called "Funkwerk", i.e. radio-works. Funkenwerk translates as sparking-works), TAB of Wuppertal who used to be a customer of mine and so on.
None of them has anything to do with the original companies which have all gone bust long ago or been closed down after the demise of the communist dictatorship in former East Germany plus a few names like "Berliner" which were simply made up to sound somewhat German and/or familiar. All as genuine as the "Original Rachenbickler German cuckoo clocks" that noone in Germany has ever heard of.
Mind you, I'm not saying that the products made by Telefunken USA and the others I've mentioned here are in any way bad. They're just not the genuine thing - if that ever existed...
Just to put a few things straight.
Cheers,
Ralf
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I know the owner well. Very cool dude. He has hundreds uncirculated DAT tapes sitting in his closet. I'm trying to get my hands on them..
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Vintage ELAM 251 mics are one of the most sought after mics in the world and can fetch prices of $15K or more each.
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ralf, in this case the Telefunken name wasn't licensed. Rather, an enterprising individual discovered that the trademark status of the Telefunken name and the diamond symbol, etc., had lapsed in North America. He applied for those trademarks himself, got them, and licensed their use to Toni Fishman, who isn't legally permitted to use those trademarks anywhere outside North America.
"Telefunken USA" is a clone manufacturer. They sometimes try to portray their products as "re-issues" but to my mind that is a pretense. When Neumann made a limited number of U 67s available for sale in 1993, which they had assembled from their remaining parts stock plus their ongoing capsule production over 20 years after they had discontinued that model, that was a re-issue. But when none of the key original parts (capsules, tubes, transformers, circuit boards, housings ...) are available and a third party comes along and puts together a microphone from reverse-engineered imitations of those parts, that's a clone.
The fact that the Telefunken emblem on the outside is also a clone doesn't make the microphone behind that badge any more authentic.
You are right that Telefunken never manufactured professional microphones. At the end of World War II, Telefunken had international contacts which Neumann, Schoeps, AKG, Beyer and Sennheiser did not. Those companies (all of which but Neumann were just starting up in those years) made distribution agreements with Telefunken because at the time, they couldn't handle this themselves. That situation continued into the mid/late 1950s, when the manufacturers gradually set up their own distribution arrangements.
Telefunken's approach was always to require the manufacturers to put the Telefunken brand name put on the products they sold. Thus there were "Telefunken" U 47s, "Telefunken" M 221s, and so on--at the same time as Neumann and Schoeps were selling those same microphones domestically. See the catalog page below, which shows Sennheiser, Schoeps and Neumann microphones all with Telefunken emblems on them. Telefunken continued to sell a limited number of these companies' studio microphones well into the 1970s, as parts of their equipment packages for broadcasting studios.
The Telefunken Ela M 250 and M 251 were exceptions in that they were manufactured by AKG solely for Telefunken, and were never in AKG's own catalog.
--best regards
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Just a quick update
The Dead 2009 are using Toni's Telefunken USA vocal mics.
And Toni has made some audience recordings of The dead 2009 with a re-engineered ELA M 221
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A previous post on this site cited an article about Phish using the Telefunken USA vocal mics as well.
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A previous post on this site cited an article about Phish using the Telefunken USA vocal mics as well.
true
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A previous post on this site cited an article about Phish using the Telefunken USA vocal mics as well.
true
here is the press release and article on the telefunken site:
http://www.telefunkenusa.com/literature/press/phish.php (http://www.telefunkenusa.com/literature/press/phish.php)
I wondered why the vocals I heard from the Downloads of the hampton shows sounded so clean...
;)
-- Ian
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the M-80 even has it's own web site
http://www.m80mic.com/ (http://www.m80mic.com/)
when ever I hear the word Telefunken, all I remember is the classic line from Zappa's Joes Garage about the present " It looks juts like a telefunken U47 - with leather"
-- Ian
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just found a review of the M 80 not that we here are looking for vocal mics exactly
but it's nice:
http://www.performing-musician.com/pm/jan09/articles/telefunkenusam80.htm (http://www.performing-musician.com/pm/jan09/articles/telefunkenusam80.htm)