C214

Agree with most of this, but the original 214 came out in 2008 and was literally just a 414 without polar pattern selections, and a great lower-budget mic.

For example, I have an Akg 214 made in Austria but it's a completely different league

AKG C214 Or sometimes a dynamic T.Bone MB85 Beta Both do a great job for recording my Yamaha CG162c. Plenty of headroom for eq, great capture of detail and a fairly neutral starting point.

Yeah, I have two of those that I use as overheads and they're great

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.

The C214 capsule and the whole microphone is made in the same room, on the same machines, by the same people as the C414. Those are both made in Hungary.