rob aylestone
Moderator
Counterfeits are bad, own brands good. I suppose that is the binary version. It gets complicated when you start trying to justify the fakes. If they say Neumann, and made in Germany, its very hard. Same with Shure SM57/8 that say made in Mexico. Innocent people buy them thinking they are real. They got ripped off. How does it work when people like us buy half a dozen fakes for their local music venue open mic nights, because the old ones got stolen, often regularly? They're still fakes, but perform well enough for nobody to notice. If they get pinched you lose 25, not 100? We are now into morals and ethics.
The thing to remember about Chinese manufacturing is that it is not like ours. They have access to factories with the tooling to produce electret and traditional mic capsules. Huge scale. The mic ‘maker’ just buys them in from the capsule factory when they need them. The big problem is when the box is empty, three months later and the capsule supplier has no stock. They simply order from another factory, and they sound different!
Probably worth looking at LED lighting for another example. If i need 8 super dooper moving heads to replace ones i have that failed through time and poor cleaning, I do NOT buy 8, I buy 10. The reason is that LEDs come in big batches like mic capsules. The next batch will not be a match. The red, green and blue LEDs will be slightly different. In my experience, the Blue is the worst and a row set to blue where one is a later batch is immediately obvious. So, the rule is buy more than you need and either keep a couple back, or just use them all, but when they fail, you still have enough. This has been the rule for years and is applied to all makes from cheaper Chinese to the mega price Robe and Martins. The LEDs are in batches.
With mics, a brand isnt a brand from China. If you buy more than 50ish, they will put anything you like on them. i could have my own brand of ROB mics, which is pretty much what MXL and others do. They could engrave or screen print the mics i. Their own country, or have the factory do it?
Plenty of classic mics had changes to components over the years that changed the sound. Its just evolution. I had some of the KETS mics from china. They are great and dirt cheap. I have sold loads of them and make happy meal sized profit but its still worth doing. Suddenly they started to arrive with KTES instead of KETS on them. Same mic. The factory said very sorry we made mistake on order. They ordered a box of embossed labels, and as they were in essentially a foreign language to them, nobody noticed. They just stuck them on. People were asking me if they were the same or different mics, but it was just a mistake.
If you look on aliexpress for mic capsules, you will find loads. The people who make them just sell them to the firms who assemble the mics. You can even buy the housings and the PCBs. You could order all the parts and build them yourself, and bingo, you are a microphone manufacturer!
The thing to remember about Chinese manufacturing is that it is not like ours. They have access to factories with the tooling to produce electret and traditional mic capsules. Huge scale. The mic ‘maker’ just buys them in from the capsule factory when they need them. The big problem is when the box is empty, three months later and the capsule supplier has no stock. They simply order from another factory, and they sound different!
Probably worth looking at LED lighting for another example. If i need 8 super dooper moving heads to replace ones i have that failed through time and poor cleaning, I do NOT buy 8, I buy 10. The reason is that LEDs come in big batches like mic capsules. The next batch will not be a match. The red, green and blue LEDs will be slightly different. In my experience, the Blue is the worst and a row set to blue where one is a later batch is immediately obvious. So, the rule is buy more than you need and either keep a couple back, or just use them all, but when they fail, you still have enough. This has been the rule for years and is applied to all makes from cheaper Chinese to the mega price Robe and Martins. The LEDs are in batches.
With mics, a brand isnt a brand from China. If you buy more than 50ish, they will put anything you like on them. i could have my own brand of ROB mics, which is pretty much what MXL and others do. They could engrave or screen print the mics i. Their own country, or have the factory do it?
Plenty of classic mics had changes to components over the years that changed the sound. Its just evolution. I had some of the KETS mics from china. They are great and dirt cheap. I have sold loads of them and make happy meal sized profit but its still worth doing. Suddenly they started to arrive with KTES instead of KETS on them. Same mic. The factory said very sorry we made mistake on order. They ordered a box of embossed labels, and as they were in essentially a foreign language to them, nobody noticed. They just stuck them on. People were asking me if they were the same or different mics, but it was just a mistake.
If you look on aliexpress for mic capsules, you will find loads. The people who make them just sell them to the firms who assemble the mics. You can even buy the housings and the PCBs. You could order all the parts and build them yourself, and bingo, you are a microphone manufacturer!
