Missile Incoming
By Jack Alexander

A mic that could eliminate conspicuous consumption

When you think you know everything (at least about the stuff you care about) you always get blindsided by circumstance and have to refigure your universe. Circumstance, in this case, is the Oktava cheapo condenser microphone- you know, the little silver thing with the screw-in pad and capsule that comes in the cut-rate plastic case.

With the exception of harmonica players, who revel in using bus station paging mics from the fourth decade of the last century, most sound biz types have very little use for cheap mics, condenser or otherwise, especially when budget allows for more elite choices. Ah, the visual sensuality of a pair of 414’s over the cymbals, or maybe a 4011 on the hat - the height of conspicuous consumption. We love our 451’s, KM84’s, 834’s, SR 78’s, and all the other fancy European/European influenced iron. Such a pity that they all just got vaporized... Condensers are a crapshoot in live use because of their wide response and reach. They provide a broader bandwidth than our pet dynamic mics, and they pick up that bandwidth from further away.

And they are definitely more subject to overload problems, feedback problems, and too much time and money spent for repairs.

Which is why I was extremely not amused when Mr. Ian, our big band’s lead sax player, unplugged his 421 and waved this silly looking silver toy at me. Unfortunately, the crummy desk we use (you know the rules - unless it’s a major tour, the worse the console the better the paycheck) has global phantom, so I couldn’t play any games with him about the 48V being down on his channel strip, which would have forced the return of the 421.

Great. The rest of the section is running 88’s and 421’s, I’ve got minimal monitor EQ, this thing is going to feed like crazy and blow all the EQ matching I’ve done strip to strip with its extended response... Then he’s going to jam his horn against that little bitty capsule and generate a square wave that will incinerate the crappy alleged mic preamp on this excuse for a console, there will be no way to “de-harsh” the thing, it will have no lower midrange warmth, and I probably will hear the hat louder than the horn. Ugh.

Well, the hat was pretty loud, but the rest did not materialize - only a detailed yet warm (glowing, harmonically rich) horn sound with a lot of detail and no harshness. That was a while back, and in the ensuing months I used the Oktava everywhere: Seven for foots in a big theatre for a musical, where they beat every other foot mic I’ve seen, including the ubiquitous and highly overrated boundary stuff. It actually was able to retain thickness (stuff under 400 Hz) before the rig lost it to feedback. I had great sound from the hand drums off of the table mics, which found things in the congas that the close-in 421’s completely missed.

And the stuff on the table sounded the best, as it had the now-expected Oktava low-mid presence combined with the reach of a condenser, with no unnecessary high-frequency response. For anything wood and acoustic - can’t say enough about them. Nothing else has the combination of reach and warmth with minimal feedback.

Still haven’t broken my 414 habit for piano (depending on the situation I will use 1-12 mics in a piano, but most of the time I have a 414 on foam near the high hole), but I am going to start experimenting with the Oktava there too.

As for my main symphony mics, which had been boundary, there’s a new sheriff in town, though I will probably have to put panty hose on top of a standard windscreen with these suckers due to their lower-mid bump.

They are anything but flat, their quality control can be politely referred to as third world on a good day, the U.S. distributor is a music store, for God’s sake... and I don’t care.

The current fairy tale is that these are made in an old missile factory in Russia. I am not the sort of person to make tasteless jokes about missiles being sailed up the lower parts of competing manufacturers. (We are above that at LSI.) But if I were in the mic business, I would crank up the R&D fast. and maybe invest in a concrete bunker, ‘cause we definitely have incoming here.

Jack Alexander lives his life in a hurricane of sound. His controversial and eccentric ideas are always food for thought. Jack can be reached at jalexander@ livesoundint.com.