SONY C100, ECM 100U & 100N Hi-Resolution Microphones
“The violin sounded so sweet through the Neumann U47 and custom-built Giles Audio valve preamp… However, we all chose the Sony”
The sleeping giant has woken. Sony has finally released new studio microphones, its first new studio-specific designs in over two decades.
So why now? Is it just having a corporate mid-life crisis, reminiscing over the golden days of mics like the C37? Or was Sony’s revered C800G thermo-electrically cooled tube microphone (released 25 years ago) just too hard of an act to follow?
To understand the reasoning behind Sony’s new microphones, we perhaps need to dig deeper into the guiding principles of Sony’s entire audio vision. Unlike other manufacturers racing to the bottom. Sony Music doesn’t just support Hi-Res audio, it’s built an entire eco-system around it. It makes Hi-Res audio players, both for home and portable, it makes some very nice-looking signature series Hi-Res players and a range of Hi-Res audio headphones which have a frequency response from 4Hz-120kHz.
There’s actually no universal definition for Hi-Res audio, though generally speaking it is uncompressed audio delivered in a higher bit rate and sampling rate than CD quality; 16-bit/44.1k. Typical Hi-Res file formats
