Apex Electronics 205

Run my own serious project studio, pushing 40, professional recording engineer/producer/session musician.

I own several serious studio mics and lots of average ones, my home studio consists of a yamaha rm800 24 channel desk, EV and yorkville monitors, akg phones, dbx, drawmer, focusrite, ART, dod, alesis, chandler, yamaha and many more makes of preamps, compressors, fx, gates, protools digital fostex analog tape, mics by akg, neumann, shure, adk, cad, sennheiser, peavey, ev, apex and I'm sure the list goes on, vox and fender amps, yamaha and korg keys, akai sampler, much more.

I rate this a conditional 9 for certain purposes. As a general purpose mic it would only be a 7 at most, it's not going to be your first mic purchase and I don't recommend it for most vocals or items requiring brightness or evenness or flaterring responses for most items, not great for clarity.

What it IS great for is micing guitar amps, especially lead guitar IMHO. Fantastic tone for that, best mic in my collection currently for the tone I'm looking for. Also gives that great soft cymbal tone when micing a drum set if you're looking for that tone, not maybe the typical choice these days though. Can be used on vocals but not my personal choice, can be great on horns especially brass if you don't want it cutting through your mix too much but still want a ton of detail in the middle range.

I'm rating it irrelevant of cost and for the specific purposes I mentioned. The cost is so cheap that it's a 10 in that case.

30 year recording industry veteran with experience in live and studio sound as well as professional audio product design.

Could this be the ribbon microphone deal of the decade?

This long geometry (2")ribbon mic made by Ningbo Alctron Electronics Co., Ltd. in Zhejiang, China available as the Apex 205 is a good deal and can get even better. Read on.

The stock Ningbo Alctron ribbon motor and transformer used in the Apex 205 are really quite decent. They're copied from classic American ribbon mic designs. Priced very inexpensively, thousands of mics like this are finding their way into the hands of recordists who are new to ribbon mics and the special handling and usage care they require.

In order to keep down the number of returns due to blown out ribbons, the manufacturer added many layers of wind blast protection to the mic. They sure do work - to the detriment of the fine sound this mic is capable of delivering. The stock sound is slightly muffled, bandwidth restricted and has slew rate limitations. To get every last drop of performance out of another great value mic, I recommend removing these mechanical filters for a great ribbon mic modification.

To get better LF and HF extension, lower mechanical ringing and improved HF detail, Remove the inner fine wire mesh grille, the wire box and silk bag assembly, and two perforated shields along with their silk layers. Add some dense foam to the cage supporting the ribbon motor to damp mechanical resonances and stuff open cell foam into the base canister to close off that acoustical chamber and eliminate standing wave resonances.

You'll like what hear.

Top and bottom frequency response is improved by about an octave at each end, transient response is improved, a closed-in congestion is removed and the "pinging" resonance of the perforated plates is eliminated. These modifications produce a great-sounding ribbon mic for drum over-head, guitar cabinet or vocal use. Of course, the mic has to be treated with special care now - it must be kept covered while moving it about the studio and a pop filter used for close mic vocals.

Improved LF response is not only valuable for picking up low register sounds - better LF extension means better phase accuracy in the important midrange. The bass-to-mid transition is tighter sounding. This is why designers of high end audio equipment try to achieve design implementations that approach DC - to have better low to mid range phase accuracy.

The Apex 205 for under $90 - an unbeatable ribbon mic value with modifications.