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Here we have another gem from the golden age of amateur tape recording. The Cadenza ribbon microphone was designed to go with the Simon SP4 tape machine. The SP4 came with a myriad of features, and was firmly aimed at the top end of the enthusiasts’ tape recorder market, with a price tag of 95gns. The Cadenza ribbon microphone could be purchased for an additional 10gns. For those who are unfamiliar with pre-1971 British currency, the guinea was worth £1 and 1shilling. In the 1950’s luxury goods were often priced in gns.

Imagine my excitement a few days ago when this sturdy, and well-travelled, vintage BBC OB microphone case arrived in the post! A generous gift from a reader, Richard Shute. Richard’s father, Ashley Shute, started as a young engineer with the BBC in 1953. After intense technical training, he was an outside broadcast sound recordist for some years, covering news and sporting events. By the early 60’s he had moved to TV, initially as a sound recordist, and then dubbing mixer for popular programmes like Z-Cars & Dr Who, as well as TV-News.

One of the musical highlights of my teenage years was seeing the Michael Wadleigh film of the 1969 Woodstock festival, in Cinerama, at the Theatre Royal Manchester in 1970. An amazing surround experience, viewed on a curved screen 65ft wide and 28ft high! It was a quiet midweek matinee, with only me and three other people in that huge auditorium! So, I sat bang in the middle with the screen occupying my entire field of vision! Several decades later I was delivering a lecture to a group of Music Technology students on the development of PA systems in the 60’s and 70’s, and featured a video clip of Santana playing at Woodstock.

For the student, or anyone who is new to the world of audio, buying a first microphone can be somewhat daunting! Over recent years online selling sites have become awash with knock-offs of popular microphones posing as the real thing. Many of them use images and text stolen from the genuine product. The pictures above are a typical example. Can you spot the difference? One thing is missing from the box on the right……………. Yes! You’ve spotted it……. The brand name SHURE is missing! It has also magically disappeared on the microphone itself.

Starting in the mid-1930’s Selmer London began producing a range of electrical equipment including amplifiers, PA equipment and guitars. The microphone pictured here appeared around 1945, and can best be described as a glorified telephone transmitter on a stick! It was most likely intended for use in factories, offices, department stores and educational establishments as part of internal communication systems. It was sold through the well-known UK high street electrical store Currys. N.B. A pretty much identical transmitter was used by the British military during WWII. So what makes it different?

(Very cool red logo with a Soviet era Russian vibe) Over the last 2 or 3 years I noticed a number of adverts for these microphones on selling sites such as eBay and Reverb claiming them to be ‘boxing ring’ mics. (The drop down mics used by announcers at the beginnings and ends of fights.) Not being a boxing fan, and not having seen such use of a microphone, this raised my curiosity. MEICO was not a brand I had ever come across before, and so I made a purchase and started to investigate.

In situations which may require completely unobtrusive microphones, such as in conference chambers, or interview rooms/studios, the Beyerdynamic MPC22 will quite literally disappear into the woodwork!  A suitable sized hole can be drilled in a table top or a ceiling and the body of the microphone passed through and fixed in place with the nut pictured above. The two rubber washers insulate the mic from the mounting surface. All that is visible on the outside is the small wire mesh grill. Connection is with a standard 3 pin XLR. The casual viewer could be forgiven for assuming that judging by the surface mounted domed grill the MPC22 is an omnidirectional microphone.

This illustration from the British weekly newspaper The Graphic was printed in 1917, at the height of the First World War. It details a proposed application of binaural listening. A pair of ‘electric ears’ are positioned one on either side of the hull, at front of the vessel, below the water line (as shown in the diagram). The ‘electric ears’ are most probably carbon microphones. These are hung in, what is described as, ‘dense liquid of a secret nature’. Whilst dense liquids provide excellent transmission of sound, I can find no evidence of any liquid that actually magnifies sound, as suggested above!

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Every so often I buy a microphone purely out of curiosity. The Discreet Archive Earthphone is one such purchase I acquired recently. It’s an unusual sound gathering device which invites the user to go exploring! Based on a geophone design the Earthphone has a frequency response from 10Hz to 1kHz. It can be used to listen to low end sounds (particularly quiet sounds) inside a range of subjects both natural and manmade. The Earthphone comes with a choice of three different sensors which can be interchangeably screwed on to the body pictured below.