I bought one of these about 9 months or so ago. I was pretty surprised with how they sounded. To try them out I threw them in a live mic pack at a club I had a live system at just to give them a run. They don't sound at all like any of the mics I have ever used on drums in the past. To date I have only used them on toms. Generally speaking to get the loud big tom sound with heavier bands I end up having to boost some lows, dip some low mids, and add some attack on the really high frequencies ( at least with beta 98's, senn 604's, beta 56's etc...). These mics sounded HUGE. In order to use them without big problems I actually had to tame some of the lows, only make a very small low mid boost, and a slight boost in the 6k up region. The tom sounds were massive, but can be hard to keep under control without a little effort sometimes. One of my other engineers tried them briefly once and hated them. I kept telling him that you have to forget what you have always done with tom mics in the past and told him what to do. Finally after a month or two he tried them again and did what I reccomended to him and he now loves them as well. He even sent me a text that night saying he could not beleive what he was hearing and that he was having a hard time getting the kick drums that night to sound as big as the toms.
There are a couple of things I did not like about them though. First, you have to be more careful what drummers you use them with because cymbal bleed is a little more exaggerrated with the K micro's then with standard tom offerings. Second, they are light weight and not as durable as other mics. He told me after a couple of months that he was bummed because a couple of them had broken, but when I was in the club next I found that the tips with the white plastic ring and the mic element had come out on two of them. I just put the tips back in and they worked fine. I imagine they got hit by a stick or maybe stepped on during a changeover and the tips just came out (they are glued in and not mechanically secured), but they still worked fine. Anyone who uses beta 98's enough will understand how bad it can be when a micro mic is hit, but with the beta98's the tips are screwed on so when one gets ejected from a misplaced drum stick then it is a Shure repair job, and not a DIY fix. Also, the set screws to hold the xlr pins in place come loose, but this is also a common problem with many mics and needs to be be monitored on occasion. The other thing I noticed is that the clips are pretty cheap. You can barely get the clips tight enough, especially on my Shure metal tom mounts, to keep the weight of a quad cable from tipping mechanically moving the clip and they end up pointing at the sky, or worse, the under side of a cymbal. My solution was to gaff tape the cable to the tom mount to create a strain relief and reduce the cable pull. This is also something I do with all of my beta 98's to protect the small cable where it plugs into the preamp body. I even have to do that with Sennheiser 421's to keep them from falling out of their clips (the worst mic clip in the world in my opinion).
All in all, for the $80 it cost me, I think they were easily worth the money. Plus you never need repairs since they are cheaper to just replace then to worry about RA numbers and repair lead times. I still have only used them on toms though so I can not say how they will do on kick, snare or overheads. My gut says they won't do as well there or in a place where you want that flatter jazzier sound, but you never know.
