That room full of great and wonderful gear will cost you about $1-2 million dollars. You can buy Sonar Platinum for around $500, take your pick. I'm amazed at the quality of sounds I get from Sonar and it's plugins.

And, even the ones that are old are mostly no longer NOS. I oversaw ours being repaired in the '80s including replacement of the VF14M tube. Just to keep them running, repairs have often been made, from capacitor replacement to capsule replacement (the diaphragm dries out and becomes brittle) and tube replacement. There have been discoveries of NOS diaphragms and tubes after the originals were lost for years, causing the cost of the very few NOS parts to rise above complete mics. The result of this has been reverse-engineering of the parts needed by micro-industries but when is a U47 no longer a U47?

Bob

But does it even matter? In the end, don't we buy a piece of gear because of how that piece of gear sounds rather than how the original piece of gear sounds? For example, I'm going to buy a Flea 47 at some point in the near future. I'm not buying it because of how good the mic it's supposedly copying sounds; I'm buying the Flea because of how the Flea sounds. There are at many other 47-ish mics out there, some for more money & some for less, but the Flea is the one that sounds best to me, so I'm going in that direction. Whether it accurately captures what a 47 sounded like in the 60s is irrelevant to me.

In the end I think it does not really matter how close a "clone" sounds to an original vintage U47. And indeed it really only matters how it sounds .
Not only that , but I am led to understand that actual vintage U47's can sound slightly different from each other. Not to mention as Bob noted there are probably few if any vintage era mic's that have not had replacement parts installed.
Now I have had the opportunity one time, In a studio in Nashville to hear and sing through a Vintage U47 and it was indeed impressive ( I do not know if it had any replacement parts, but guessing odds are that it did)
However I would not purchase it even if were at a competitive to say the Flea or the Cathedral . To my mind I would rather get a new mic that uses modern parts and will likely perform for a much longer time before needing maintenance , than a vintage mic that will likely need maintenance much sooner.

Interesting note...I heard on You Tube the other day, a U47 that sounded like a Blue Spark, which sounded like a MXL 4000. The difference between all three was miniscule.

I think it's highly unlikely the difference between either of those mics and a good U47 is "minuscule," but I'm happy to look at the video.

My mistake they are comparing a U 87 to a Blue Spark......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98Zrh9XGiOw

That's certainly a big factor is deciding what to buy. The price of a tested VF14 replacement for the vintage mics is now sitting around $1500-$2000. The Flea can get me a great sound using the much more reasonable EF12 tube. I hesitant to think what that VF14 tube is going to cost 10-15 years down the road when someone might need a replacement. You might have to trade in a car to buy one.

And the third mic wasn't an MXL. It's a good day to blame the egg nog.

Here's the MXL 4000 vrs the Blue Spark....


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1JPBOXWZtU&t=2s

If you watch both of the above video's, you'll hear that there is very little difference between the Neumann U-87, Blue Spark, and MXL 4000.

I was quite surprised at this. I thought for sure there would be a bigger difference.

If I can't hear a difference, it doesn't matter. If I can hear a difference, it may matter, except when it doesn't.

Well that just might be a good trade :D

http://i261.photobucket.com/albums/i...ps5dzza8r7.png

I don't find spoken word mic test all that useful since I'm not looking to buy a mic for that application. That said, I do hear quite a bit of difference between the mics, most notably that the Spark sounds a bit more compressed than the MXL, and that the MXL seems to accentuate some high end artifacts that aren't all that pleasing to my ear.

But look... what "sounds good" is a subjective issue and, as I've said previously, our ultimate goals play a role in our decisions. In the end, you don't have to please me or anyone else, only yourself, so rock on, brother.

Dude, you'd be stylin' in that thing! I might want TWO tubes for that.