Signature Sound

Great sounding vocals and other acoustic tracks start with the microphone itself. Building on years of expertise, our engineering team conducted exhaustive research into this phenomenon and established just what gives the top high-end studio condensers their ineffable qualities. Then they distilled the best characteristics of these classic vacuum tube designs into one extraordinary mic with M-Audio’s trademark value pricing. In fact many listening test participants feel that the Sputnik mic exhibits the praised throaty lows and low-mids of the Neumann U47 along with the upper-mids and open airy highs of the AKG C12—making it ideal for faithfully capturing a wide variety of sources including male and female vocals.

Built for the Pros

When tweaking the Sputnik mic’s capsule and circuitry, we worked closely with top L.A. recording engineers and producers to make sure we hit the proverbial nail squarely on the head. These are professionals who have some of the world’s finest vintage mics at their disposal. And in final side-by-side listening tests, these same pros agreed that Sputnik performed flawlessly for the most critical recording situations.

More Than Just a Great Vocal Mic

Many microphones are best used for specific applications—which is why most engineers have a more-than-modest investment in a locker full of mics. We spent many engineering hours working to insure that Sputnik would provide excellent results in a wide variety of situations: Vocals have that signature sound. Saxophones are both throaty and silky. Pianos and acoustic guitar are clear and full-bodied. Brass and woodwinds are realistic. And hand percussion is tight and crisp. Sputnik allows you to put any instrument in the spotlight—and selectable cardioid, omni, and figure-8 patterns give it the flexibility to be your ultimate secret weapon in the studio

Optimized Electronics

Sputnik’s Class A amplifier circuit is an all-discrete transconductance design based on thermionic studies by researchers at Harvard and the American Institute of Physics. The amp uses a classic cascode circuit to increase the gain-bandwidth product and eliminate the effects of parasitic capacitances, giving the system a wide frequency response. The resulting high output impedance makes the mic very tolerant of load conditions (it’s in the meg-ohm range so it acts like a perfect current source). And while the tube does all the heavy lifting, Sputnik’s head amp employs an n-channel depletion-mode JFET for biasing so you don’t get all the nasty artifacts like hum and crackle common to tube-only designs. In essence, the Sputnik’s tube circuitry delivers ultra-smooth harmonic detail and rapid response to signals with fast rise/fall times, thereby eliminating transient problems. The amp is quite linear and features graceful overload characteristics and an enormous dynamic range due to high-voltage operation. These qualities simply cannot be achieved with a standard transistor amplifier or one of the more common Class A tube designs.

Solid Brass Backplate

Condenser mic design is based on the changing capacitance between the moving diaphragm and fixed backplate. Where many of today’s microphones cut corners with a metallized plastic backplate, the Sputnik features a precision-machined, solid brass backplate that yields much greater crucial rigidity, precise tolerances and faithful sonic reproduction. We use a dual backplate design similar to the one that lends the AKG C12 its trademark open, airy quality. We also tune the backplate for optimal on- and off-axis frequency and pickup response and pattern symmetry.