Ribbon Microphone Upgrade for MXL 990
Microphone
TL;DR – 3D printed ribbon bracket, 3D printed transformer bracket for MXL 990
Mic, along with a Ribbon alignment jig for a
element.
My Journey
I’ve been a long time audio buff and musician, who has a little recording studio in my basement. It’s always fascinated
me how expensive “good” ribbon microphones were, yet their construction was terribly simple. If you traverse the web,
you’ll see I’m certainly not the first to go down this path of homemade Ribbon Mics. There are a number of good
resources out there on the series of tubes. But of course, I’d like to think I’m a little different, and you can be the judge
of that. My approach has been to use cheap microphone bodies and upgrade, rather than making a body from scratch.
This has some limitations with respect to the dimensions of the body, but I think it gives a much more professional look.
At the same time, you now have to convince someone that the guts in that MXL is a whole lot better than they might
think. But once they listen to it, I think they will be able to make that judgement themselves. In addition, with my new
3-D printer, I figured I could design and print anything I might need to help the process, and it seemed some tools and
jigs were missing from all of the other posts I had seen.
Starting with a Kit
What started this journey for me was running into Rick at
(sadly, it was more than a year
before I could finally get the time to finish this project). I saw he had everything you need to make a Ribbon mic
element (motor), transformers and even a complete mic, along with an excellent set of instructions and videos. He was
