You're both right. When I left L.A., I sold off my B&K mics gave my AKG condenser mic to somebody, got rd of my Neumanns, and got out of the business.
Now many years later, starting all over as a bottom feeder in a small studio, I had to watch my dollars and try to find things that would be exceptional values at low cost while I rebuilt my stockpile. In short, I had to look for "deals". Old friends helped out by giving me great deals on stuff, or letting me pay things off over time.
That's how I got a lot of the high dollar stuff you see on the ITR list. The rest of it is pretty much an open book that's been written here on the Internet. I got most of the stuff you see from dealers, ebay, and sales on newsgroups.
Now to the "Stephen Paul mods". About 10 years ago, or more, I went to California to drop something off for repair at Tascam, and while I was near L.A., I stopped in at Stephen's house to show him a pair of Farchild F-22 mics I had traded something to get. They were a little noisy and Stephen immediately tore them apart. He changed out some resistors and the FET and there was a great improvement. When I put up my equipment list, I listed them as being modded by Stephen, which was true.
A couple of years later, I found that Dan Kennedy (of Great River) also loved the Fairchild F-22 mics, and he had a new class A circuit that dropped right in in, and ran off straight phantom power, instead of the 70 volts worth of internal batteries it used. Dan did the mods, which eliminated Stephen's mods, so I changed my site to reflect that it was now Dan's mods in those mics.
Finally, I think littledog asked if I still have "gear lust".
Absolutely not.
Well, maybe a little bit.
Yeah, I guess so.
But it's no longer gear lust so much as it is the realization that better tools make our job easier. As someone noted, I have only one Neumann - a TLM-103, but I've got some pretty nice ribbon mics. We pretty much use the board's preamps, but we have a few great pre amps here, certainly world class.
We'll be adding a 24 track HD recorder here in the next couple of weeks (used, for an insane low price, if this deal works out), simply to make tracking and mixing easier, and saving wear and tear on our 9 DA-38s which are running 10 to 12 hours a day, every day. They'll be used from now on to only back up sessions at the end of the day.
Over the last few weeks, we bought an old Goya guitar for the studio, a Fender Squire Strat, a 15 Watt Fender amp, and a Furman headphone system for the big room - all used, all cheap. I also bought two used stand-alone CD burners (one for each studio) so we could burn rough mixes directly to CD, bypassing a step to DAT. I bought a brand new CD burner for the mastering computer when my Plextor went out a few weeks ago. I bought 4 more MXL-603s.
Pretty exciting, huh? I'd like to get another
Lexicon PCM-41 for the little studio, but I refuse to pay the $350 that they go for on ebay.
If
a Neumann U67, M269, U47, or U48 ever came along for around $2k, I'd get a bank loan if I had to, and have Stephen do a full mod on them, but I ain't likely to see any of those mics for $2k.
Other than that, between the big mics I do have, I'm getting a damn good sound, and I'm sure I'll find something to love in Alan's little box of goodies I received last week.