Sony F-V300

From the Xaudia Blog

"This unusual Sony microphone (left) looks like the younger brother of a C38b (right) or maybe a C48 condenser mic, and shares the same high build quality and some hardware components with these mics. But in actual fact this is a high quality cardioid pattern dynamic microphone, model F-V300.

Inside, the microphone is very simple, with just a capsule in the top compartment, and the on/off switch and transformer wired to a printed circuit board below. The fixed grey output cable looks to be the same type as found on the C38b.

The capsule is suspended from 8 small springs to act as an internal shockmount, which seems to work well, in conjunction with the yoke, to acoustically decouple the microphone element.

This example has some traces of foam around the element, indicating that an internal windshield has at some time been removed.

The label states that the mic is nominally of 1kΩ impedance, although in practice seems lower than this and it has no problems driving standard low-Z microphone preamps. The output is strong and clear across the range, and the output is similar in level and detail to a healthy EV RE20, although with a more pronounced proximity effect."

This has become one of my own favourite mics for guitar amps.

From Soviet-American Audio...

".... It’s next to impossible to find one of these mics, and even harder to find any information on it. With only two clues to go by - the first being its unusually higher-than-pro and lower-than-consumer output impedance of 1K and the second being its model number (it appears as though all of Sony's Japanese karaoke mics start with “F-V”) - I am almost positive that the F-V300 was Sony’s flagship karaoke microphone......" Read more at Soviet-American

A post about the Sony F-V300 at the Xaudia Blog

Soviet American Audio discuss the F-V300