dualmonolab
Member
I can't agree with the idea that there aren't a lot of mic capsules sold. In addition, I wasn't talking about surface mount components.
Look at the inside of a U87, there are a handful of very common components. The only custom component is the capsule, and even that is made of basic components. Machined brass, gold sputtered mylar film, plastic spacers, machine screws. The headbasket is a wire mesh component.
There's nothing unique or proprietary .Quite the contrary, everything can be measured, from the component values and physical dimensions to the actual circuit. It's something that could easily be built and sold for 1/4 the price of a Neumann model. Having worked with Chinese factories, I know that if you give them a target, they'll meet it. They were just as capable as the Germans, Japanese or Koreans at making products. A CNC machine works the same in Beijing or Sydney as it does in Berlin or Willis.
Granted, if you just want them to provide a cheap copy of something that looks like a high end product, someone has it. I'm not talking about knock off Chibson guitars for $100. I'm talking about actually engineering and building a quality component such as companies like Eastman do in the guitar market. They are quality products, although their designs are not necessarily direct knock-offs or exact copies of other products, they play and sound just about the same as their target designs.
I don’t know where to start. You vlearly haven’t tried to work with chinese manufacturing Industry. They, simply put, have a different manufacturing method if you will. They will work a given assignement and try to make it as costeffective as possible. They will have lower cost playing their employees, but I am sorry to say, that said workers do have different work ethics when compared to for instance german employees. If you’ve been to China and Japan, you’d know what I was talking about. There is a World if difference even there. The Japanese generally take personal deapfelt pride in everything they do - not the same case with the chinese people. It’s a cultural thing.
Well you know it already, that’s why you wonder why it is not possible to do the same thing in China that it is in Germany - or Japan or Dennark for that matter.
I know for a fact, that all miniature microphone capsules in the Danish DPA Factory goes through up to 50 individual tests until found suitable for the Microphones - and here I am talking about Microphones that cost as little as 300 USD. Then take the capsule in a 4011 for instance. Perhaps DPA will produce a couple of hundred of these per year. That’s a VERY small quantity, if the machine used to produce them alone costs, say a million dollars. That is not something you would ever get a chinese manufacturing department to do. Way too little money to make on such an investment.
And you do say, that there are many large disphraghm capsules produced? Say over a ten year period 1/100th of the worlds population will purchase said capsule in a microphone. Then perhaps there is, let’s put a low number on it, 50 different capsules in the World. That’s somewhere around 100.000 of each capsule Per year IF the one Factory could be deliver ALL capsules of this type, which is rather unlikely. Now compare that number to an Intel i5 processor (or whatever they are called these days) - they will be in every other living persons possision. That’s 3.000.000.000 - and two years later there will be a new current model to produce. That’s mass-production.
It’s the same reason a lot of tubes are now made of unobtainium. Small quanities is just not profitable to produce. And even worse as more and more people don’t want to pay the price that quality products inevitably costs.
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