Ohma Mics

Hey there- Sammy from Ohma here

Thanks for the words about our mics. Happy to answer any questions y'all might have.

To clarify a few things, yes, three of us here used to work at AEA. We were the sales, marketing, and design team for many years and worked on the N22, N8, preamps, and the KU5A. The KU5A and N8 were my personal projects that I pushed to make happen. Sergio from Bock/Universal Audio is also a part of the team at Ohma. We're only 4 people here!

Our capsule is an original design. It's based on an article from a science journal in the mid-1900s that was meant to teach how to make a condenser microphone. It's an interesting article that had some great ideas. We spent three years tweaking the design until it became it's own thing. We call it the Debby capsule as an homage since one of the original authors was named Debenham. It's a unique capsule because it's a single backplate design, like a K47, but with an edge terminated diaphragm, like a CK12.

Most comparable ribbon and condenser mics are in the $1000+ range. We are able to sell ours mics at the current pricing because we designed them to be easy to machine and assemble, and we do the important and expensive operations in-house which include painting and making our own capsules.

Our mics are made of aluminum and the screens are made of stainless steel. Our paint is a ceramic film that gets sprayed (by me personally!) and then baked in an oven for two hours. We use a custom Lehle transformer in our ribbons with active electronics and a vintage cinemag from the 90s in our condensers (yeah the 90s are vintage now, crazy). We're one of less than a handful of companies that make our own capsules, and even fewer that aren't making a clone of an existing capsule.

Our R&D process has always involved trying different materials in front of the ribbon. Different mesh types and materials typically have a significant impact on the top end and how the mic responds to proximity effect. At other mic companies we've worked at, some mics were almost identical in design with the exception of different internal screens. We wanted to see how far we could push this by trying different shapes and seeing how they would impact on the sound.

We tried 40 different designs. Some sounded like trash and some sounded great. We picked our 5 favorite sounding designs. While we made screen designs that are even more drastic, we wanted to start with ones that didn't completely change the sound (like removing most of the low end).

The screen design that was linked here is called 'Stripes' and it's a bit more mid-forward and focused. The old B&O mics, Royer, and some of the RCA mics have a similar design on their grilles. We use a much larger ribbon with a lower tuning though which gives more low end than the other mics mentioned.

And yeah, Samar makes amazing mics. Mark is a great dude and an incredible designer.

If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer here. Feel free email me at Sammy@ohmaworld.com if you want to try a mic in your own space.

The artist they spotlight on their website are amazing and probably would make any mic sound good. There is some strong marketing pulling me in. I’d be curious to hear about the recording chain they used for those sound demos and artist spotlight recordings.