Ray, I wasn't intentionally making any personal attacks on you or your friends at Gefell. The information about using tiny tubes explains to some extent how they've skirted the power supply issue, so that is good to know.
I don't necessarily share the same intensity of admiration that you have for Gefell as a company. This comes from personal experience with some of their mics, which I think are ok - but not, for me at least, blowing me away.(I own an 800 and a 70s). But also, from conversations with one of their engineers who insisted that it was impossible to make a well designed stable microphone diaphragm with a thickness of less than 6 microns. Since the world's greatest authority on ultra-thin diaphragms recently died, someone else (with more pure engineering knowledge than me) will have to take up the torch on that argument.
But the real question for me is, how do the tiny tubes sound compared to "real" tubes? Is it just a gimmick, or is there a real design consideration for using them? And if it is a really great idea, how come we are not seeing them in more microphone models?
I guess I won't ever know until I have the chance to work with the 900 myself, and I haven't yet had that opportunity. Which leads to yet another question of why, given how cool it looks, do so few studios seem to own one of them? I'd be interested, Ray, in your impressions of the 900.
