Quote:
Originally Posted by Brent Hahn
Basically, when people recorded to tape, the knock on the KM84 was that it wasn't bright enough. You could get the brighter AKG C451 for less money.
So Neumann killed off the 84 and replaced it with the 184. They designed it to be brighter, and kept the cost down by eliminating the transformer. But they did it just in time for people to make the shift to digital, where people wanted warm, not bright. Oops.
All things being equal, I'd take the 84 over the 184, but they're not all that different. And all things aren't equal -- 84's are rare and pricy.
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I honestly think the big difference between the 84 & 184 comes down to simple circuitry. The 84 had a transformer. The 184 is transformerless. Transformers add "weight" to sound...which is a nice way of saying "non-linearity". If you use the right preamp, you can add a lot of that back in to the 184...at least in my experience.
And you bring up the 451...which might be a better all around guitar mic anyway