ASPEN PITTMAN: My name is Aspen Pittman. I'm the founder and designer at Groove Tube Microphones. Also, we make audio products. Groove Tubes is a 31-year old company specializing in vacuum tube technology but about 15 years ago we began making studio products, microphones, another interest of mine. This is kind of the culmination of 31 years of working with tubes and ribbon mics and this is our Velo 8.

Velo is short for velocity microphone that's more of the technical for a ribbon mic and 8 being the pattern of the pole or the front and back pattern, figure eight. This is our Velo 8 microphone as I was saying. We've been making the passive microphone for some time. This is the new active one. It has a tube preamp in it. There's a couple of things about ribbon mics in general that you might call Achilles' Heels that we've addressed with this particular model.

First, the ribbon motor itself is very unique in several ways. We have two magnets in the structure, and I'm pointing out here, and they have a shape to them that we call it the rooftop shape, the flat on one side and they're pointed on the other. That allows us to focus the magnetic field right on the ribbon. It also creates an acoustical collection chamber like this so to speak so that we pick up more energy and get more output from the dual neodymiums. This motor has a lot more output than any other kind of ribbon mic just from a fundamental standpoint. At this level, we're going to do other things downstream with this design to increase the output.

One thing we do is have a transformer with either a 75- or a 300-ohm tap on it so that gives me more output. But the most interesting thing about this is one problem with ribbons is they're very fragile. They can break, and if they break you have a long wait time until you can get that ribbon replaced. WE made a ribbon that mounts on a PC board with a plugin and it screws out before screws. When you buy one of our microphones, and I can show you one of the packages here, you get an actual ribbon which is sealed in an anti-static bag, ready to be installed. Should you blow your ribbon, it's eight screws, about 10 minutes with a Swiss Army knife. No soldering, you change your own ribbon out in the studio exactly the same as the ribbon that is in the original mic, intentionally built the same way. If you take the old ribbon, you put it back in its box, and you mail it to me, we will re-ribbon it for you and send it back for a charge of $50, including the freight. So, every mic comes with an extra ribbon. Should that ever happen, you won't lose your. That's unique. Nobody's doing that in the industry.

Of course, even a ribbon mic built like this with more output than the rest of the ribbons still doesn't compete against a condenser mic for output, which means that many people buy ribbons and plug them under existing consoles and preamps and they're unimpressed because they literally have very low output. They don't have enough gain, and a big ignored aspect of front-end audio is you don't have the right impedance, so not loaded correctly. Ribbons have a very low impedance output, and if you load them at the very high impedance preamp like a 2,000- or 3,000-ohm preamp, you're going to get a really wimpy sounding microphone.

One thing that we've done with our preamps and the SuPRE here, the stereo unit preamp, which is kind of an evolution of our ViPRE, our variable impedance preamp. Well, the theory is the impedance that you load the microphone with has a big, big influence on how the microphone works, not how it sounds. It will sounds similar but it will reach, it will change the polar pattern on how you load it.

In the old days, ribbon mics, at Capitol Records for instance, that might have a 50-ohm or a 150-ohm output on the microphone, they were going into an input console that had a matching input load. Today, the popular theory is that your source should be 10 times the load, so you would think if it was a 150-ohm or a 200-ohm microphone, by traditional audio engineering recommended standards you should have a 2,000 or 3,000 or higher source, and that's what the thinking is again. But really when people keep going back and buying these old mic pres made in the '60s or the '50s or the '70s, because that wasn't the popular thinking then, then it was more about matching, not making something 10 times higher.

Just imagine a power amp that's going to put out 100 watts into an 8-ohm speaker. You plug in an 80-ohm speaker, you're not going to get anything out of the power amplifier, and that's kind of what happens when we transduce your level like a ribbon or a condenser mic that drives the preamp. So, one of the key features of our SuPRE is we have a selectable impedance front-end that I can change the way the microphone loads, and that changes the way the microphone sounds.

Right now, we're listening to the tube mic version of our ribbon mic. We've added, in this microphone, a special seven-pin connector, a tube power supply, and inside that microphone is a tube preamp. So, this is a ribbon mic with a tube preamp that kicks up the gain another 20 dB, and you now have a microphone that has the output level of any condenser mic or more so, and it has the loading characteristic that will be impervious or less so to the highly -- high-impedance-type inputs that are common out there. Now, if you want to go the full signal chain and go way back to the '50s and the '60s and get those kind of resonant resolution -- high-resolution warm feeling recording tracks, you need a ribbon mic and you also need a console or a preamplifier that loads it like the old days. That would be down here, our stereo unit preamp.

Now, this is a stereo unit. We're only demonstrating one side of the mic preamp right now, and I'll give you another little feature of that, but we can load it at 1,200, 600, or 300 ohms. Each of those are going to have a relatively different effect on how the microphone works.

The other thing about our microphone I'll show you is the way we align the ribbon in the microphone changes the way each side sounds. If you take a ribbon mic and you put it perfectly in the center of its magnetic field, it will put out a perfect figure eight. That means it sounds the same on both sides. But as most people don't use figure eight very much, they use cardiod mostly when you're recording, they point it at the guitar, they point it at the microphone, at the vocalist, so we wanted to have a ribbon mic that had a little more versatility. So, we intentionally misaligned our ribbon inside the magnetic field so that each side sounds a little different.

Now, I'll give you a demonstration you can actually hear on tape. I'm going to sing a little something. I don't know what. [LAUGHING]

[SINGING] Ah, you must remember this. A kiss is still a kiss. A sigh is still a sigh they say. You must remember this. A kiss is still a kiss.

[RESUMES NORMAL SPEAKING VOICE] So, slightly characteristically I don't know which one. You'll have to tell me. One is going to have a little more highs, one's going to have a little smoother top end.

[SINGING] You must remember this. A kiss is still a kiss. You must remember this. A kiss is still a kiss.

[RESUMING SPEAKING VOICE] So, two different sides of the microphone give you a dual purpose microphone. You can use it for guitar on one thing it might sound better and vocal on another.