sE Electronics - WA-47

I've always had negative experiences with warm audio in a pro studio. Last time I heard a warm 87 and it was complete garbage, and most pro's I know scoff at the brand. That might just be the snob in me cuz I'm blessed to be able to work in pro studios with real vintage neumanns. I don't have much experience with Warm mics, tho, can y'all fill me in on what's up with them? Is this one mic just an outlier in their catalog? Or has my snobbiness just got the best of me? So this seasoned pro producer came into our studio, super smart guy, been doing records for decades, has an amazing ear & I trust his judgement a lot. He brought a Warm Audio tube U47. And we shot it out against every top tier mic we have. We've got a killer original vintage 87 (not the ai) that I love, and an original M49 that is one of the best mics I've ever heard. Also tried a Mojave MA300, and a Pearlman TM1 which is like a 47 clone. And this Warm47 was beating them all??! I've used original 47s in the studio before, so I know the sound signature. From my experience the originals sound a little darker and grittier than this Warm47. However, disregarding the fact that the sound signature is not 100% exact to the original, it's pretty damn good!! It's clean, has a robust low end, and a very smooth top. It's brighter than the original, but the brightness at the top end is very articulate in a pleasing way. We used it on drums and the cymbals were super clear and not harsh at all. So why does this mic sound so good if all I heard is negative things from the brand? My gut tells me that maybe this mic is an outlier in their catalog, or maybe their earlier releases were budget trash before they really figured it out. Not sure what the lore is here.

Tbh voice and room matter quite a bit more. I have recorded the same singer on a OG 251 in a professionally built, floated but mediocre sounding room (overly diffused by the designer) and a WA47 in a stellar sounding (also purpose built and designed, but much more modern design) room and it’s not even close. The stellar room with the mic that’s 5% the cost wins every day.

Got one when it was up for a Musician's Friend Stupid Deal Of The Day last year for $600. It's the only Warm product I own, tended to turn my nose up at the brand but curiosity got the better of me at that price. Honestly, love it. Vocals, AC guitar, mono overhead, it does the U47 thing. Prefer it to the Advance Audio CM47 in my day job studio's locker. When I rent a room that has a real tele/neumann one I use theirs, but the Warm is plenty good enough when I don't.

Audio engineer here. The Warm audio wa47 jr is suppose to be very good and won’t break the bank. The same goes with the Audiotechnica at4040. I would go with the warm.

The 47 is the only mic ive liked from them. Def a outlier

You've heard them in person? The WA47 is the best clone I've heard, by a mile.

I agree with the other user, the WA47 is miles beyond other clones if you haven't tried it. Strangely, I've heard, the WA67 is actually closer than the 47. I may have that backwards as well.

The FLEA and WA47 are the ones I've had the most experience with and I really dislike them both lol

The WA47 is actually exactly what I think of when I think about what I dislike about the U47 sound. I liked my friends FLEA better, but I still hated that one too lol

I suggest experimenting. I have found many rock vocalists that sounds great on a SM7 or SM7B sounds real nice on a good U47 Tube mic replica. We use Heisserman however there are lots of great ones out there. Pearlman is another one. Recently on an album I produced for a indie pop rock artist we used the H47 and SM7 depending on what the song required. If we wanted 3D hi fi in your face we went H47. If we wanted super vibe and slightly distorted we went SM7. I think you’ll find high quality U47 tube mics a little more open. But they lack that loaded energy the SM7 can have with the right singer working it. If you want to hear the H47 check out William Garrett - Clickfarm. It’s one of the songs we used it into a distressor.

I don’t know that mic you reference, but I have never heard anything good about usb mics. Ive only used Audio interfaces (lol and tape before that!) I did an experiment because I had the luxury of time, a willing band, and a home studio. I took an array of overhead drum mics on a really epic drum kit with an excellent drummer, and had him play the same part as close as possible over and over with 8 pairs of mics (we also did 5 positions each, e.g. xy, ab, Glyn Johns). The mics ranged from cheap, but good, Golden Age mics, to ones around $1000. Then, I had the drummer and guitarist rate and make notes about each. I asked them to rank them from A - perfect, how a drum set should ideally sound to F - bleh, sell the mics Perhaps unsurprisingly since I don’t have any mics I don’t like, the lowest score any got was a C+. Still, some of the mics used are not ones I would usually use for overheads, like I used a pair of dynamic vocal mics I had included as a bit of a check, expected them to be even worse. There was very little interrater variance. They both liked the same and disliked the same. Looking at the results by price, there wasn’t any correlation. The bigger pattern was that the guys liked large diaphragm condensers best across different positions. The top pick was a set of Warm Audio 47Jrs. Overall, while the main thing was not science, but deciding what mics we wanted to record his kit with, my ultimate impression was just that modern affordable mics are pretty close in overall quality. Even some of the ones not rated A in the drum test, are some of my absolute favorites for vocals or micing amps.

All I can say is that I had a WA47 in my studio for several years, and got it in my head that I needed to build the significantly more expensive D-EF47 from vintagemicpcb to replace it. After many many many hours of soldering and tweaking, and a lot of money spent, I set them up for a shootout and both the vocalist and I both thought the same thing - "shit...they kinda sound the same." To be fair, every vintage u47 I've been around sounds a little different, and there are so many different capsules out there. In my mind a good u47 should make a vocalist sound "larger than life", and the WA47 certainly checks that box. Not all WA stuff is good, but some of it is. If you haven't looked into their RCA 44 clone, you should. I will say that my D-EF47 does have a lower noise floor, but that might just be the better PSU. I have also settled on Adrienne Audio’s Flat 47 capsule, which makes it sound a bit more like a M49, which I think is what most people actually want when they want a u47 haha. It’s a less colored sound than the WA47 which is helpful for mixing later, and I don’t miss that 5K bump which I never like on female vocalists.