?Well, this week has not been good to me. For no explained reason, my Soundelux U99 and both MXL V69s are in the shop. The Soundelux U99 has a hiss that is way too loud to be usuable. One of my MXL V69s is the same way and the other simply died on me.

This is very strange because I'm always super careful with my condenser mics. (I take all my frustration on my SM57s which have been copied while designing tanks).

I'm starting to have second thoughts about this whole tube microphone thing. The MXLs are cheap...they are inexpensive, but they are also cheap. Their shockmounts are cheap, the construction is cheap. That's what you expect when you buy a $300 microphone that sounds that good. It's clear that the Soundelux is built about 20x more solidly than the MXL. It's clear that the MXL mics were meant to last a year or two and the Soundelux was meant to least many, many years.

Now the Soundelux is a real deal, professional microphone that is worth the price of a crappy used car. I'm guessing it just needs a new tube or something like that.

Either way, the pain in the ass factor recently on tube mics has been way too high. I hate having to hook the mics up an hour before the band shows up so the mics can warm up. I hate the fact that I can't always count on them. I hate the fact that every tube mic I own right now is in the shop while my solid state mics just keep on trucking.

Maybe I need to invest into some high quality solid state microphones and wait a while on the tube condensers.

Brandon