And some 2004 look at SE Electronics' factory
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb04/articles/chinesmics.htm

There's always the Shure SM7B and Electrovoice RE20 if you want to go off piste :)

That was Mr Rupert Neve..

Just about any large diaphragm condenser from SE Electronics will sound good

@Bitcrusher, do you frequent GroupDIY? I used to a lot back in the day but rarely do anymore.

@DrDave, I'll have to open the mic up, I don't remember which model I used. I used some kind of sticky plastic mastic, I don't think it was silicone based though. It was very heavy and obscenely sticky. The shells went from a high *ping* to a dull *thump* once applied. I did the same thing to the shells of some Oktava 219 mics, which also suffer from shell resonations,

These are the cheapest Chinese small-diafragm i know of at 35$ a pair, but they're said to be good quality : http://www.karmamics.com/shop/K-Micro-Matched-Pair.html

Svart--which Lundahl model did you choose over the Sowters, I have some time over the holidays and I need to mod another ribbon. TIA.
Dampening the body--yup, why do they make these things ring like a bell? Ugh. Did you use Silicone caulk for dampening?

@DrDave Depends I think where you were - the BBC is huge! Just in case I misled, the Tannoys were (are!) my own, the ribbons in use by the BBC World Service were 4038 - wonderful. I particularly remember some of the Hausa speakers who had the most amazing voices, and the ribbon mics sounded just wonderful. You have to remember this was all mono and the programming was mostly live so you didn't have time to mess about. You'd have 15 mins to get into the studio and set up a live show which ran anything from 15 to 120 mins, in any of 36 languages. Editing was fun! We did once attempt to do a stereo (crossed pair) recording with 4038s, during a slack day, and they stuck themselves together with a fairly loud "clunk". But they were great for drama work as you could have an actor apparently walk off into the distance by simply edging around the mic towards the dead zone, and were also used a lot as solo singer mics and for miking up certain instruments. Very sensitive to vibration, though.

Depending on the area of work, you'd have access to all sorts of mics, from specialist single-unit crossed-pairs to specialist ribbons like the lip-mics, to (of course) gun mics and M&S rigs.

I did purchase and use Schoeps for the sound effects recording I did (I did that job for a year and made some of the early BBC SFX CDs, using initially a NAGRA with Dolby-A noise reduction cards, then later a Sony PCMF1 and a phantom-power box I made myself, feeding its mic inputs). They were probabaly some of the first Schoeps mics in the BBC. I thought they had amazingly low noise and with the knuckles and the "ball-gag" (a sort of spherical Rycote-windshield), they made for a very compact stereo rig. The low noise was great for sound effects recording as some locations / sounds were incredibly quiet but aside from that, to be honest I didn't like them that much personally. To me they had too sterile a character.

I think mic placement is also very important - having a great mic is probably similar really to having a great camera, you still have to point it in the right direction!

You are right about transformer quality for a ribbon mic - very important. Essentially you're taking a very low source impedance and multiplying the voltage to something usable by a mic preamp.

Good article (bottom link). I have a pair of old Tannoy ribbons which sound great - hard to describe as not a sparkling, contemporary sound, but they make a great job of sounding "natural" as they pick up the sound of the room very nicely. I'd recommend anyone who's curious about ribbons to have a play with one. We used them exclusively at the BBC world service and they were wonderful on speech.