AKG - C114

I’ve got samples and they sound solid. The hardware is solid and the stands, mic clips are metal on the 104 and 114. C104 sounds tighter than the P120 it replaces. C114 uses the edge terminated capsule and sounded great close to a P420. They have simplified by not having pads but this range is aimed at smaller studios and podcasters. Haven’t spent much time with the C151 yet.

Modern large diaphragm electrets can actually be superior than "true" condenser microphones. Electret just means that instead of prepolarizing one side of the capacitor with a high voltage obtained from a charge pump (tiny switch mode power supply circuit), a extremely thin teflon layer is put onto the backplate and then charged with high voltage. Electrets have a bad reputation because usually on the cheap chinese capsules the input JFETs are on the capsule and out of the 3 terminals of the JFET, usually just 2 terminals are wired out. Which means you can only build a really crude amplifier circuit with them. But in the case of the C214 and 314, it lets you save precisious current in the circuit, so you can have more quintessence current for the amplifier circuit and makes the microphone able to use P12 without change sensitivity and sound. The only thing that might change is the microphone's ability to reject common mode power supply noise. So this ability makes them very useful if you need to use wireless transmitters with LDCs.

C214. Its literary the same capsule as one half of the CK12 but with a few microns of teflon heated onto the backplate. virtually there is a littlebit of additional capacitance because of that, which increases nonlinearity by a unperceptable amount. But thats nothing compared to the C414 where the two capsules are in parallel, so one acts as a capacitive pad for the other, which increases distortion by a lot. I am a strong believer that the C214 is actually a superior mic compared to the C414 XLS and XLII. And because the C114 and C104 circuits are vastly superior compared to the C214 in dynamic range (132dB in the case of the C114), the ultimate CK12 style microphone would be the C104 with a C214 capsule. Gras makes high-end measurement microphones and they only make electrets. And boy, their linearity is extremely good.

About 10dB (native) dynamic range difference (C151=126dB, P170=116dB) and a much better polar pattern in the case of the C151. Of course on the P170 you can use the pad, but pads suck...