AUSTRIAN AUDIO OC818 Dual Diaphragm Condenser Microphone

When AKG decided to take the path-most-trodden and move production to Asia, a core group of engineers, designers and management decided to stay put in Austria and keep the dream of superior Teutonic microphone manufacturing alive. With several filing cabinets worth of new design ideas, an ambitious R&D program and plenty of organisational nous, Austrian Audio was born. The company’s first offering is the OC818, a microphone that blends classic capsule design with bleeding edge digital innovation to create something quite unique.

MAKING HISTORY

“On vocals the mic was great, delivering what I was increasingly coming to associate with it: superb tonal balance with trouble free low-end and silky highs that took EQ very well...”

When AKG moved away from their iconic 1950s valve-based microphone designs and released the C414 in 1971, they probably didn’t imagine that it would still be in production (albeit with a confusingly large amount of subsequent modifications) some 48 years later. The original C414, as well as early versions of its immediate successor the C414 EB, utilised the CK12 capsule. Along with Neumann’s M7 this is one of the undisputed ‘holy grail’ microphone capsules from the golden era of European microphone design. CK12 capsules were difficult to build due to their brass-mounted element and were time-consuming to service and maintain, but sounded like a million bucks. At some undefined point during the 1970s AKG quietly switched over to a more stable nylon-mounted element that made manufacturing easier. The mic lost a little of its magic, but continued to be an extremely