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 | | | | Feb28Written by:Bill Park
Wednesday, February 28, 2001 6:00 PM  Last month I detailed the fun that I had in acquiring a pair of vintage AKG C-28 microphones. This month I have done a lot more research into this model, replaced one of the capsules, corrected some errors in some of my earlier information, and spent a lot of time bending Tracy Korby's ear about my new acquisitions. I had hoped to have the mics and power supplies in hand by now, but unfortunately they are not ready yet. Still, I have discovered a lot about these microphones. Let me share some of what I have learned with you.
AKG: A Little History
The two men who started AKG got together in 1945 with the plan to make theatrical loudspeakers, projectors, exposure meters, and other products for movie theaters. Post-war Europe was rebuilding its destroyed theater industry, providing a fertile market for the right company. Ernst Pless and Dr. Rudolph Goerike made several profitable products between 1945 and 1947, at which point they founded AKG, which is the acronym for "Acoustic and Cinematography Equipment".
AKG made a handful of microphones in its early years that were unique and popular. In 1953 AKG introduced the C12, which became an international best seller and was a turning point for the young company. This microphone was particularly popular with the engineers at the BBC, which led to a long-standing arrangement between AKG and the BBC. The company reputation was set and its financial foundation was solid. And its direction was clear…. The future for AKG was in acoustics.
In the ensuing years AKG has produced some of the most popular studio quality microphones in the world, and has been a leader in headphone, phonograph pickup, and other audio industry technologies. This is a far cry from the original company product line, which included car horns, door intercoms, telephone handsets, and anything else that they could sell. I'm sure that many of you small studio owners can relate to that concept…. I know that I certainly do.
Customer Support? And How!
AKG Service Manager Karl Peschel was fast to respond to my initial queries, but I had no idea how really helpful Karl was going to be for this article. No, he wasn't able to find a pair of VR-30 extension tubes or W17 ‘poppingscreens' for me. However, since my last installment he did send pages and pages of information about the C28, and photocopies of documents from as early as the 1950s describing not only the microphone, but also some of the developments that led to the microphone's creation. He sent detailed exploded-view drawings, flow diagrams, vintage dated schematics of each revision of the microphone, original company promo brochures, and a copy of a paper by Konrad Kimla of AKG that was printed in the Official Journal of the British Sound Recording Association in August of 1960, "New Microphone Developments".
Among the treasures Karl sent was an owner's manual and tweaking tips for the power supply. He also sent along a pile of information in German, which I have only partially translated. I can get through some of the German, and I have a friend who's field is technical German. If there is any information worth adding to the discussion in the German language papers, I will post it in the next installment.
A New Design
Many of you know about the C12 but fewer know the history that surrounds this classic piece, and the Siemens and Telefunken-branded versions of the same microphone. I'm not going to go into much of that here, except to say that a large part of the design of this microphone was an attempt on the part of AKG to respond to the requirements of the Austrian national radio network. It had requested a studio quality microphone designed to be "as slim as a pen." Head of the original AKG C12 design team Konrad Wolf remembers, " Nobody was able to do that at the time. But in any case we came up with the slender, cylindrical shape of the C12." The C12 broke design ground for its size and shape while maintaining top-flight performance.
This shape and the general design characteristics of the C12 are carried over to the C28, on a smaller scale. The original C28 was introduced in late 1955 or 1956. The condenser transducer used in the CK28 capsule came from an even earlier AKG design completed in 1951. The C28 is part of a series of microphones that were designed as broadcast products, specifically for their slim attractive appearance. An AKG goal was to maintain the studio quality of the product within the size constraints required. This from a Service Memo from AKG:
"The reason to develop a C28 simply was the ambition of the development engineers to make a small sized condenser microphone of studio quality, with linear frequency response and changeable capsules. As in these days condenser microphones were all rather big and had large diaphragm capsules, their use was limited to certain recording areas….."
Although these microphones seem to be huge by our standards for small diaphragm condensers, when they were brought to market they were considered to be so small as to be invisible on camera. I guess when compared to a Neumann U-47 or RCA 44, these babies are tiny. Perhaps on a 1959 8-inch black and white television screen with rabbit-ear reception, they ARE invisible.
Article Continues >>
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