JOE WALLACE: I'm Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com. We're at AES 2006, and I'm talking with Brad Lundy, president of TransAudio Group. How are you?

BRAD LUNDY: I'm good. I'm good.

JOE WALLACE: Now you have a new line of mics and they've got a variety of applications. Tell me a little bit about them.

BRAD LUNDY: Yeah. This is the line of Heil Mics from Bob Heil, who's one of the original inventors of live sound. He did the first big PA for the Grateful Dead. He did all kinds of work with early pioneers The Who whose Next Tour was all done by Bob Heil. He invented large scale PA. He's kind of come up with the first new thing in dynamic mics in probably 20 years. It's called the Heil PR Series, and basically what makes them different is that they are large diaphragm dynamics. It's a line of three of them. It starts with a PR 40, and goes to the PR 30 right here, and then we have a PR 20. These are good for recording and for live, and they are really, really good for a lot of uses. In fact, PR 40 here was just used on a big part of The Killers' record on vocals. It's on the Sam's Town record. Flood and Alan Moulder were using this microphone. Down here, the PR 30 got used quite a bit on the Tool record, 10,000 days for guitar amps, and we're seeing the PR 20 showing up on stage. Joe Walsh has been touring using PR 20's on stage, so it's quite a versatile line of microphones. The PR 40, even though it' used for such nice applications as vocals and studios, it's only $375. The PR 30 is quite a bit less, under $300, and PR 20 is $200.

JOE WALLACE: Now, you got a lot of names using these microphones and people would expect the price tags at least to be a lot higher, given the attention that they're getting from the industry. Why is the price tag so farther down than what you'd expect?

BRAD LUNDY: Well, because these are dynamic mics, which means they're less expensive to manufacture than condenser microphones that you typically get. They're also made right here in the U.S., right here in Illinois. Heil is based in Illinois. They're all put together right here so they can keep cost down without having to do a lot of shipping back and forth across the world and all that. So, the real bottom line to this is that it's kind of a new technology that hasn't existed before to get dynamic mics to sound really good.

JOE WALLACE: Now what is that technology?

BRAD LUNDY: It's a larger diaphragm that uses a special technique for how he can get his diaphragms to be very light and to provide really excellent transient response, so they don't sound like a typical dynamic microphone.

JOE WALLACE: Now in the past, that hasn't necessarily been the construction of choice, the dynamic mic, for people who wanted to go in studio and live, but now they're starting to move towards this because?

BRAD LUNDY: Well, they've never -- Because they've never really had a dynamic that sounded quite like this one, you know. The big idea behind dynamics is that they're nice and durable, so they've been this mainstay of live sound for years and years and years. Typically though, they're built very heavy and they're thick and the diaphragms are built for durability. This microphone has got a new technology that enables it to be both durable and to sound good and to provide both functions in one package, so it's a different kind of thing than we've had before. As I say, it's the first new thing that I think I've seen since the early '80s.

JOE WALLACE: Now, in the past, were these type of microphones more expensive? Could a small band that doesn't have the exposure of The Killers or Joe Walsh be able to afford something like this in the past? Is this a new trend for the lower prices? What's going on here with these mics?

BRAD LUNDY: Well, you know, every now and then you get a breakthrough product in audio. Every now and then, you get a product that changes the paradigm. You know, I think early Mackie consoles were one of those sorts of Paradigm Shifts. I think early Audio-Technica mics and condensers, low-cost condensers were that kind of thing. The Heil mic is sort of the first new thing in dynamics that reinvents a dynamic microphone. There's really nothing else quite like it out there.

JOE WALLACE: We've been talking with Brad Lundy, president of TransAudio Group. I'm Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com at AES 2006.