Vannes Ambrosi VAAM Ribbon 2

The VAAM logo is a contraction of Vannes Ambrosi, which was an Italian company based in Milan, Italy, in the 1950s. VAAM specialised in selling products, parts and accessories for television, radio, electricity, household appliances, and telephony. They were located at Via di Scarlatti, 30 (Staz. CENTRALE) Milano, Tel. 27.31.21

Information about the company is scarce but a large catalogue of parts and products from VAAM has been uploaded to The Internet Archive. That catalog shows three ribbon microphones although none are a match to this exhibit. One of the microphones looks very similar to one made by RIEM, who were also based in Milan, which was a major centre for audio equipment manufacturing in the 1950s.

(Thanks to Marco Alberto Matti at Casemate Recording Studio)

This microphone has a ribbon gap of around 4mm and 50 mm in length. The magnetif field is suppplied by six alnico horshoe magnets at the rear, which are in place by steel bands. The field around the ribbon measures about 1500 gauss, although that may have been higher when the microphone was new. Attempts to re-gauss the magnets were not successful but some small booster magnets were added between

The output transfomer is large with what appear to be silicon steel laminations, with a primary inductance around 200 microHenries. The overall output impedance is around 10,000 ohms. For our recording we connected the microphone to a home made DI box.

See a catalogue of parts and products from VAAM from 1954.