MXL 992

I have a degree in production and engineering from Berklee College in Boston. In Berklee's studios I used a lot of workhorse large diaphragm condensers like U87, U89, C414, etc., plus some other weirder things. But this MXL is the first condenser mic I've actually owned.
At Berklee, I had lots of choices of recording gear, but I usually went through SSL G preamps into the Protools 192 things. At home, I'm currently going through the Edirol firewire FA-101 into Cubase on my G4. Besides bringing my own stuff to listen to in Berklee studios, where there were always NS10s, assortments of Genelecs and various other brands of monitors, I own a pair of biamped Alesis M1 mkII's.

MXL 992 is a large-diaphragm cardioid condenser with internal Mogami wiring, a highpass switch and a 10 dB pad. The SPL handling is 130 dB spL and the pad brings it up to 140.
I like it very much. The sound is incredibly smooth and clear. I'm going to have to get another mic as well, because the curve is very characteristic and I can't use it on everything. There's an ever-so-slight emphasis on the midrange, around 1k, and there's a huge slick sweetening way up at like, 11 or 12k. But it sounds really good, it's not a bad place to emphasize, but sometimes I don't want that.
Places where I always want it include drum overheads, guitar amps (I always hear this really high stuff in the air on a guitar amp that I never hear in recordings and it's sweet for picking that up), acoustic guitar and breathy vocals. I haven't tried it on strings yet, it would probably work great. But often I find myself using EQ to darken non-breathy vocals when I don't want so much stuff up there. And I like to use less eq whenever possible.
I should also add that the 992 sounds smoother and less metallic than the 990 and 991, those two that come together for $100. And it doesn't have the tube warmth of, say, the V69. But I have to say that most of these MXLs I've heard sounded really good, especially for the price.
So yeah.