chapter 5 microphones - Posted on 2015-10-14 by Steven Esposito

This week a few of us with my mentor took apart a Neumann U87 mic to attempt to clean the diaphram. The mic was having a problem with shorting when a vocalist would sing loudly into it.  It turns out that the moisture from the singer would interact with the amount of buildup on the diaphram and cause the mic to short and stop working. Apparently the U87 is one of the only condenser mics which, if you are careful can be cleaned at home. We used a soft paintbrush, distilled water and a paper towel. After removing the screen, we wet the paintbrush and softly brushed the surface using enough water to pool a little bit on the surface. Then we used a paper towel to absorb the water. We let it dry for a few hours and it solved the problem. It's not every day you get to see the inside of a 3000+ dollar mic. 

Also this week, I helped remove channels from the SSL 4000 board up in the control room. Being that the board is so old, some of the channels are having problems. So we moved them to one end of the board to have them in one section. It was pretty interesting to see what the inside of a channel strip from an SSL 4000 looks like.