By all accounts these are excellent-sounding microphones and that particular combination for M/S is well regarded by those who've used it. Pretty good for a microphone design that is, I dunno, maybe 40 years old by now. But the mikes have only 1 mV/Pa sensitivity, so you'll need ~20 dB greater gain than you'd need with typical studio condenser microphones.
A few years ago I bought a pair of M 160s and tried to use them, but one of them picked up radio frequency interference from the electrical wiring that I couldn't get rid of, and of course it was made 20 dB worse by the 20 dB extra amplification that these mikes require. So I had to switch back to my usual condensers, and never got any good takes with the ribbons. Since I was never able to cure that problem, I eventually gave up and with regret, sold the mikes.
This is getting to be more and more of a problem with microphones that are more than a few years old--they were never designed for today's RF environment with all the cell phones and pagers that people are carrying, WiFi networks, etc.--the radiation in the GHz range is far higher in level and far more widespread than it ever was before. The handwriting is surely on the wall for unbalanced microphone hookups, and the manufacturers of preamps, mixers and recorders are having to pay attention to shielding, grounding, RF bypassing and "pin 1" problems more than ever before--though most low-cost recording equipment is still built in precisely the way that makes these problems worse, because it saves a few bucks (basically if you can remove the cover of a preamp without disconnecting any wires, and the mike input connectors are soldered directly onto the main circuit board as they are in 99% of all low-cost Asian-made recording equipment, then that preamp is inviting RFI to "come in and party" even if it has balanced inputs. That's a bit of an oversimplification but it's close enough for rock and roll).
This problem was brought home to me when I was listening to the recordings of an Audio Engineering Society convention from two years ago, and I heard Blackberry signaling noise on the recordings. I also hear that sound rather often in news feeds of Congressional hearings on TV. Once it gets into your recording, it can't be filtered back out.
--best regards
Topic: M/S w/quad ribbons? (Beyerdynamic content) (Read 4214 times)