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Looper's Delight
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Bill and my band, Rhythmical, once worked with the producer/engineer who had done all the studio testing for the original Crown PZM microphones when they were first invented. He told me that when they were first released Crown sold them for $1,500 each. They were thought of as a niche market and this was in the 80's when there was still a very, very healthy commercial recording studio industry (which has wittled down to very few studios that make a living these days). When all the big boys and girls who could afford a specialty mic for a big studio like that had bought them, they ceased selling. Crown reduced them to $750.......................not many sales. Crown reduced them to $500.......................same diff. Next they changed the housing (plastic instead of metal but the identical statistics for recording and the same mic element and licensed them to a company called Sound Grabber, I believe it was called. They sold them for $89 at one point and noone bought them. They reduced that to $69 (I know because I was watching the process). Ultimately, Crown licensed the microphone to Tandy (Radio Shack) and they sold them for $49....................again, to very little sales. At one point I saw them as cheap for sale for $39 each (and bought two at that point). This engineer claims they were identical to the original $1,500 Crown PZMs. He also hipped Bill and I to the fact that you could use two little 6 volt batteries that when added together were the exact size of the one AA 1.5 volt battery that the Radio Shack mic took. We opted (for budget sake) to just rewire the batter pack for a 9 volt battery. This radically upped the mics output and increased it's frequency response (this all according to this producer who had worked for Crown). At one point I made a demo of our band that I was extremely proud of using two of these microphones on either side of a large plexiglass square in my garage. On one side was the drum set with one SM 57 on the snare going through a completely wet signal digital reverb and the output going through an amplifier. On the other side were the two guitars and bass amps, faced up at the PZMs We would record for 30 seconds..........stop the little four track cassette tape deck that we had and listen to the results, then adjust the volume and/or the eqs or effects of each instrument until we got a really nice balance of guitars, to basses to drumset (who bleed from the single SM57 added reverberation to the kit). There was bleed into each mic but we could turn up the drums or the guitar/bass tracks with impunity to change the mix. We then played our whole set back to back (we were really well rehearsed at the time) and then went back in and overdubbed vocals on track 3 and overdubbed guitar solos on track 4 and mixed. The result demo tape sounded damn good for how primitively we recorded it. Damn, those were good times! We were broke but making the very best with the equipment we had. If I had know then what kind of a recording studio I'd have in my home right now, I would have thought I had died and gone to heaven. Thanks for getting through this longwinded remeniscence...................I haven't thought about those mics in years. (I finally sold them at some point when I got broke and was no longer using them much). ps I heard that the mics are still in the Radio Shack inventory but not listed in the catalogue (this from an employee at Radio Shack) You might still be able to contact Radio Shack to buy them.