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6 - User Manual
M-Audio Shock Mount
The Sputnik’s capsule is rubber-mounted internally,
but you should still be careful to protect it from
physical shocks and abuse. Always use the Sputnik
with the included M-Audio shock mount on a sturdy
mic stand. It’s a comfortable, stable structure in
which to seat the mic and it aids considerably in
reducing unwanted low-frequency vibrations from
your recording setup that can transduce into the
audio path.
Solid Brass Construction
Machined from solid brass, the Sputnik’s non-resonant
body is glass-bead blasted and coated in nickel and
hand polished. The capsule’s protective grill has
a >90% opening with radiused edges resulting in
virtually no edge diffraction and a superior off-axis
response.
Close Tolerance for Matched Sets
Many professional recording techniques require the
use of two mics with identical (or near-identical)
frequency and polar response. Every Sputnik mic
is manufactured to be within 1dB of the published
specifications. This means you can consider any two
or more Sputnik mics you buy to qualify as a matched
set for stereo or multiple-mic recording.
Flight Case and Mic Bag
To aid in transportation and storage, the Sputnik mic
comes in a silver “wise-guy”-style flight case worthy
of Agent Maxwell Smart. The case houses your
cables, power supply, shock mount, and the mic itself.
The only thing we didn’t include is the shoe phone
and a pair of handcuffs.
Additionally, you’ll find a soft protective bag in the
flight case. You can use this to cover the Sputnik
when it’s on the stand but not in use; it’ll help keep
particulate matter such as dust away from the mic.
(Dust can degrade the performance of the diaphragm
over time.)
The Philosophy Behind
a World-Class Tube
Microphone
The purpose of any microphone is to capture a living
sound. The mic does this by converting the acoustic
energy of the source into its exact electrical equivalent,
which you can then record. The accuracy of this
conversion is the main criteria we use to determine
the quality of a studio microphone. Ultimately,
the best tool we have to assess this accuracy is
our own ear-brain mechanism. So we at M-Audio
spent countless hours in some of Los Angeles’ top
recording facilities—recording and listening back to
human voices and other instruments with some of
our favorite studio engineers—to develop and refine
a design that would yield the highest level of audible
accuracy from input to output. (This was, of course,
in addition to our standard empirical methods of
taking detailed measurements and gathering technical
data.)
Our decision to use a vacuum tube head amp circuit
played an integral part in achieving the accurate,
smooth response we were going after. But some
people may wonder why we elected to employ a
vacuum tube amplifier rather than a transistor-based
integrated circuit device. Conventional wisdom
dictates that tubes necessarily “warm up” an audio
signal path by coloring the sound in particular ways.
So doesn’t this coloration taint the accuracy of the
transduced signal in a microphone? In other words, if
we’re trying to capture an acoustic sound as honestly
and accurately as possible, why use a vacuum tube?
This line of thinking is based on most people’s
association with the common use of vacuum tubes
in guitar amps. Indeed, in the context of guitar amps,
vacuum tube circuits do serve to
alter the sound
by “fattening up” guitar-note sustain because of the
specific way they distort when handling overload
conditions. However, a well-designed vacuum tube
circuit can have distinct advantages over transistor
designs (even FET-based designs) for a condenser
microphone whose aim is to remain absolutely clean
and sonically transparent.