There are actually many Chinese made microphones from reputable brands besides SE Electronics that put out good consistent quality at a fair reasonable price :
@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,
@ Mark_the_Harp "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!"
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?
I use all kinds of mics in my studio. A lot of them I've modified, including the ribbons. I actually prefer the Lundahls over the sowters. The biggest problem with the chinese ribbons is that the ribbon material they use is poor. It's inconsistent in thickness and the mics are rarely tuned correctly. For one of my chinese ribbons, I bought some higher-quality ribbon material, corrugated and tensioned it to a point where I felt it sounded much better. I felt it negated the need to upgrade the transformer as I did with the other mic. Dampening the ring prone body was another fix. I coated the inside of the shell and in the null areas with a sealing mastic. It considerably reduced odd resonances.
My low cost winner is a slightly modded Apex 460 tube mic. That thing even kills my Gefells on voices/singing.
@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.
When I recorded for the BBC they had a room full of Schoeps. I asked the engineer, because I had heard they use Coles ribbon mics, and he said it was up to the engineer, he used whatever he wanted. I was shocked! I have heard from many sources they use ribbons. Would like to hear more from Mark on this, if this was just a rogue engineer. I asked if I could have the fluffy foam pop screen that said BBC in big letters after the session and he said "No." I would have given him one. Geez. I must say I do like the Coles 4038 and 4040. The "budget shootout" leaves out the SP B1, which is one of the best budget mics (but too heavy to boom). The ribbon shootout leaves out the 4040 which, well, whatever. Whatever. Incidentally, if you want to "hack" your ribbon mic by replacing the transformer, my favorites are 1. Sowter. IMHO, the best 2. Reslo Unobtanium. The sweetest, but not much output Lundahls are better than stock, but the Sowters are really smooth and rich. I actually like the Beyer M130 for voice-overs (with a Sank mod), if you have a really good amp, and you can be close to the mic. But almost any ribbon is good, or a nice juicy Neumann M147 tube.
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.