Soyuz Capsule Video

Quite the process!

...all that, and Sinsay can re-skin a $20 Chinese capsule to sound better...just sayin'...

Dr Shankenstein, aka Shannon Rhoades, "Mic Rehab" micrehab.com/
the greatest Mic/Capsule tuner on the planet, is how most see him... and for good reason 8)

cool vid btw

Does he reskin the Microphone Parts RK47? I have a pair in my Rottweiler FET47, but I could be convinced to part with them for a while if they could be improved with higher end sounding capsules etc or if he can reskin with 6 um mylar.

Thanks

One mans BS is another mans marketing !

But yeah I agree with Tim!
Someday I'm going to spend a couple of days as a Fly on the wall at Shannon's and The Lawson Factory ( because air fare to Tim's and Thirsch isn't in the budget) and Learn a bit more about how it's done
Plus buy our man Shannon a number of drinks)!

Don't jump to conclusions just yet fellas, I've had three opportunities to try this thing, although not for as long as I'd have liked, and I'll tell you this, the Soyuz mic is the first new mic I've heard to threaten the domination of the vintage holy trinity, U47, C12, and ELAM 251. Though distinct, it easily equals or betters any of them at their best. They cost $6,000-$20,000, the Soyuz, $3500.

I should be getting both the 017 and two 011's on loan for a couple of weeks, but I'm not sure how soon.. to be continued.

Heaven knows exactly why certain things just sound good. Synergy between all the variables, the sum of all parts I guess. There are some members here who are serious respected designers and engineers, and I believe even they would say great sound can be elusive, the smallest change, changes the whole equation.

I'd love to know what Tim Campbell or Sinsay would think of this if they had one for a little while. Their ears are some of the most experienced and finely tuned.

I have yet to spend any real amount of time with the Soyuz, but if I had to give a first impression, I'd say it's even better than the real thing. By that I mean it just sounds the way you WANT it to sound. Much like the great 40's Hollywood photographers, who knew how tp light a photo to great effect, making the stars they were shooting look incredible, the Soyuz brought out all the best qualities in sound imaginable. I know this is a big claim considering I haven't spent much time with it, but in this case, the cliche` "magical" simply seems true.

There's a book by Malcolm Gladwell titled "Blink". It's a story of how three of the world's leading authorities on ancient statuary convinced themselves a fake was real, and why it happened. The museum lost $10,000,000, and eventually,around three years later, one of them expressed his doubts. The takeaway was it took millions of years for our senses to evolve to the level we're at now, and the first impression is a deep and important to acknowledge shortcut to understanding something or someone. I try to keep this in mind when evaluating something, although I'm as susceptible to talking myself into something as the next person.

My first impression of the Soyuz was it was on par with the best. One thing that I'm looking forward to is doing multiple tracks with the Soyuz mics. Sounding great with just a vocalist testing it doesn't mean it'll work within tracks or as a main mic for tracking everything at home or in project studios.

did he say the guy was cutting .2 microns by hand on the lathe ?

these guys and sinsay truly are superb artisans and craftsman.

"One of our scientists". I guess they have a whole capsule lab full of scientists.

Hi Gents,
It’s Pavel from Soyuz Microphones. Thanks a lot for your interest in our capsules video. We really appreciate every single comment, even negative ones. They are actually sometimes very useful.
Based on what I’ve read, I’d like to share some info about Soyuz (please forgive my English):

“Scientist” term usage. I agree in the normal world this job would be done by technician. In Soyuz we are lucky to have Konstantin doing this. He has spent more than 10 years researching effectiveness of the coating processes (powder, lacquer, spraying, and mostly gold impingement), 5 more years were spent on research to come up with a “perfect” process of mylar gold sputtering. There are thousand ways do it based on combination of time/regime/voltage/vaccum pressure/square/density of sputtering etc. So it took us a lot of R&D work to pick the combination that will make the capsule sound like you want it to sound. Now he is still a working on few researches in the acoustical applications, so this is why we think he deserves to be called a Scientist.

“2 microns precision” We cut our capsules with 2 microns tolerance (that means +/- 1 micron). It took us more than 2 years to pick the one soviet lathe from scientific institute that could do it consistently. I agree, maybe there are CNC lathes that can be quite accurate to reach an accurate size +/- 2 microns. But there are very few that can make a perfectly flat surface with diameter of 34mm and accuracy of +/- 1 micron across the whole surface. If you say you can do it, I think everybody will be very interested to see a video of the process and live measurement, if your CNC lathe can do it, I’ll get my hat off for you.

“Simple single-stage circuit”, our SU-017 was developed by our engineer who has a degree in electro-acoustic and more than 25 years of mic development and repairs works. He knows all the legendary vintage and modern mics from inside out. As per his opinion, big and complex circuits don’t necessarily mean the mics will sound great. We have developed our schematics based on vintage U67, but added/changed few components that make it special. Many well-known producers who bought our mics judge the mic not by what they see inside, but by what they hear in monitors. And I personally tend to agree with them.

One more time on behalf of the whole Soyuz team I would like to thank you for all your comments and criticism. We are still a relatively young company and every feedback is very important.
I’ll be happy to answer any other questions you may have.

Kind regards,
Pavel