Monheim Royalty

This remarkably purple mic pays visual tribute to Minneapolis’ favourite son, while drawing sonically on one of Berlin’s most celebrated historic designs.

Based on the West Coast of the USA, Andrew Monheim is a designer of audio equipment with a very distinctive aesthetic. The Monheim range includes a number of microphones, but also some rather interesting outboard, not least a rackmounting recreation of the channel strip from the old Yamaha PM1000 live sound console, sometimes known as the poor man’s Neve. There’s also a hybrid valve/solid‑state channel strip, and if you can’t find what you want in Monheim’s standard product line, you can put in an order to their Custom Shop and have it built to your specs.

Monheim Royalty microphone with spider shockmount and colossal PSU.If that makes Monheim Microphones sound like the ultimate boutique operation, that’s probably a fair enough description — apart from one thing. Andrew says that he was inspired to start the company after “continually watching a huge disparity grow between what engineers, musicians and producers could afford, and the quality of gear they would receive”. The intention is to make boutique, US‑made audio tools available at prices that are within reach for serious hobbyists, musicians and project studio owners.

Consequently, the majority of the mics in the Monheim range will set you back less than four figures. At the price, it’s not surprising that the capsules are not sourced in‑house, but even so, the fact that you can get a pair of US‑made omni pencil mics for £500, or the large‑diaphragm Monheim FET Microphone for £620 or so, is impressive. Even the flagship of the range is arguably ‘affordable’ by the standards of some valve microphones.

That flagship is the mic under review here. It’s called the Royalty, and is adorned in a striking purple and gold finish in homage to Prince. Apparently the Purple One favoured a Neumann U67 for many of his most famous vocal performances, and so the Royalty is based on that classic design. It thus features a centre‑terminated K67‑type capsule, with an EF86 valve used as the impedance converter.

The Royal...