Successfully Marketed To

     I have been chairing an online writing-critique group for over a year now, and while the microphone in my laptop is more than adequate to the task -- it's a MacBook Air, bought during the pandemic specially for online meetings -- I've been wanting to try something else.

     Vintage microphones appeal to me and I own a few; but they're fragile for such everyday use, and interfacing them to a computer calls for extra hardware.  I'm especially fond of the classic RCA ribbon microphones, like the Type 44, a ribbon mike nearly as big as your head, with an instantly-recognizable angular case.  RCA also made a "Junior" velocity microphone, the 74-B, about half the size.  I used to own one of the big ones, but sold it when I was between jobs.  Even forty years ago, the price of one of those would buy a lot of meals.

     These days, you can hardly look at an original Model 44 for under $4000, and don't expect nice plating.  Modern exact-copy versions from AEA sell for that much and more; there's at least one other near-match model that goes for less but it's still four figures.

     The little 74-B is scarce, and prices are equally stratospheric.  Electro-Voice made a similar-looking line of mikes about the same size that commands less on the used market, and I own one that's still got the original ribbon pickup or "motor." The problem with those is they're a dice roll: the factory "repair" was a rough replacement of the fragile ribbon with the innards of a rugged dynamic microphone, and any E-V ribbon mike you find has about a two to one chance of having been "repaired" that way.

     A company called Behringer makes audio gear.  Much of it is popular with podcasters and not too many years ago, they started making old-timey-looking mikes with modern condenser elements.  One of them is the BV-44, which despite the name is just about the same size as an RCA 74-B.  It's got a USB output, so it plugs right into a computer.  And it sells for the cost of a fancy dinner, if you don't go too wild with the sides and skip dessert.  I've been looking at them for several years and I finally bought one.  It's not a ribbon mike, but even inexpensive condenser mics sound pretty good these days. 

     There's an amusing sidenote to this.  If you look at the working microphones of this style, they've all got a metal grille with an offset pattern of round holes, staggered like brickwork.  This provides the most open area, so the sound can get in.  (There's thin cloth inside the grille, too, and the whole thing is supposed to cut down on wind noise and the impact of plosive sounds on the mike element.)  In the old days, rather than risk an expensive mike as a photo prop, radio networks used wooden models, cut and painted to match the microphones, for publicity shots and advertising photos -- but the holes in the "grille" of the prop version were drilled into the wood block in a grid pattern.  About half of Behringer's advertising art shows a grid pattern of holes in the BV-44 grille, too -- but the real thing has an offset pattern, just like the big boys and for the same reason.  I suspect the art department got out a little ahead of the engineering and production side.