<Soviet sound is pretty remarkable, though few in the West have ever heard it.>
<oh yeah! Did you listen to Russian language broadcasts? I used to love the sound of Radio Moscow's English b'casts, particularly the diction of the announcers which always implied "come over to our side comrade...">
I was born and spent my first 27 years in Russia. I know very well what kind of sound you guys are talking about. At the time of the cold war, when 'grandady' Brezhnev was ruling, then later (by inertia, I guess) we used to hate this sound. The general notion was--everything Russian is crap--big, bulky, agly, bad sounding, etc. Yeah, you know, the amps were built like T-34 tank. To take it apart would take at least an hour work--it was made as a puzzle and amused us--why it was built that way. When something broke (which happened a lot), people would not swap a new board, but would find exactly what the problem and fix it. Mind you, there was no return policy for anything, for any reason.
The model was Western, or Japanese small and elegant stuff. Crapy Japanese plastic walkman would be seen as an example of 'design wonder' and 'sound miracle' with all associated legends of its '50 years waranty' and 'don't open it, as it will blow'--we thought that manufacturers put a little bomb inside to proctect the design from copying.
I still remember that once I almost bought one of those on black market. It was 200 roubles. My father is a professor in college. His monthly salary was 180 roubles at the time.
In studios we used some imported equipment, mostly Hungarian 'Beag' and whatever else--don't remember--it was long time ago. Yeah, we had some Neumanns and Shoeps as well.
I will never forget those huge Russian tube 1/4" two tracks. They were about 4' tall, made of cast metall, full of tubes and transformers inside, weight at least a ton (I am telling ya!). They were probably very fine sounding mashines, but we used absolutely hate them. ABSOLUTELY HATE.
Isn't it ironic?
I still have some tube and SS old mics I brought many years ago from Russia. They lived with me in different countries, and I love them.