Regular readers will know that here at Hackaday we have a penchant for poking fun at the more silly end of the audiophile world, with its dubious accessories and purple prose. It’s worth remembering though that this is not representative of the whole discipline of audio design, indeed the quest for perfect audio reproduction contains plenty of complex engineering problems.
We’re indebted to [macsimski] then for sending us a link to a page from Phaedrus Audio from a year or two ago, in which they discuss the history of an unusual pentode tube used as an impedance converter in a series of legendary post-war microphones. It’s unlikely that you’ll have a Neumann U47 or U48 broadcast microphone on your bench, but even so the story behind their design is one that should fascinate anyone.
It takes us back to the period immediately following the Second World War, when German electricity supplies were varied and unreliable, and radio receivers designed for them required new tubes from the manufacturers. Among these was the VF14, with an unusual high-voltage heater designed such that two of them could be connected in series across the supply. This and its compact shape prompted its selection for the professional microphones, even though its performance was so poor that only a third of the production passed the performance test.
Since it passed out of production in the early 1950s the remaining components are extremely rare, and the majority of those surviving do not meet the performance characteristics of the microphone. The Phaedrus write-up goes into significant technical detail which should be of note to anyone with an interest in tubes, and ends up with their reason for it all, a plug-in hardware simulation of the original tube’s properties. Vintage capacitor microphones may be out of the ordinary for Hackaday, but it’s still a good read.
For a bit more on capacitor microphones it’s worth a look at our dive into electrets.
Header image: JacoTen / CC BY-SA 3.0
As time goes on JFETs are starting to disappear too.
Yeah :(
TO-92 J310’s are now obsolete.
I wonder how long the SMD version survives.
I also hope that the BF998 dualgate mosfet stays in production one of the last one’s in production.
“it looks just like a Telefunken U47… you’ll love it” (Frank Zappa)
https://www.telefunken-elektroakustik.com/telefunken-usa-completes-restoration-zappa-microphone-collection
Jfets are still fairly obtainable. But yes, they are starting to get limited. Blows, I like Jfets for high end audio projects. A cascode Jfet front end sounds very nice.
I thought for sure an article about a long obsolete tube was gonna be about the London Post Office Railway :-D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway
Most engineers here and people who don’t play music don’t understand that musicians want harmonics and tone. Reproducing the signal perfectly often is not the goal.
That’s why the best recording engineers are often musicians too.
They all do, my friends. They all do :)
I muzt be lucky… my u47 has a VF14M tube that is still in good condition.
I bought one of Phaedrus audios ‘tubes’ to replace an ac701 tube in an M49. It wasn’t cheap. It also wasn’t a tube, but a fet packaged in a glass container to.make it look like a tube. £180 for a fet that became noisy in 3 months. Scam merchants. Replaced it with 5840 which has been brilliant and was cheaper.
It could be worth big bucks at a place like Vintage King.