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 We

Having agreed to review the Royalty, I was a little surprised to find not one but two large boxes arriving on different days. It turns out that although the Royalty ships in a huge Peli‑style case, space is so tight within this that there’s no room for the spider mount, which thus has to be sent separately. The reason becomes apparent when you open the case — which, incidentally, is lined with the sort of patterned gold fabric you’d encounter on a chaise longue in a Paris boudoir — to discover that the PSU is absolutely colossal. Both in terms of styling and dimensions, it looks more like an esoteric hi‑fi amp than a microphone power supply, an impression reinforced by the presence of what appears at first glance to be a volume control on the front panel.

This is actually a rotary on/off switch, and there are no other controls on the PSU. The rear panel features the bare minimum of connectivity: an IEC mains socket, a three‑pin XLR output for connection to a preamp, and a multi‑pin XLR that the supplied mic cable plugs into. By contrast, the mic itself is relatively busy, with three small toggle switches spaced at 120‑degree intervals around the base of the head part. These do the same as their counterparts on the U67 and U87: the three‑way switch on the front chooses between omni, cardioid and figure‑8 polar patterns, whilst the two on the rear engage a pad and a high‑pass filter. Unfortunately, however, there’s no legending at all on any of these switches. Their position isn’t always obvious at a glance, and unlike the switches that Neumann use, it’s easy to accidentally flip them while rigging the mic or putting it away. You really have to listen carefully every time you set up the mic to check that you haven’t inadvertently engaged the wrong settings.

The Royalty is a pretty substantial mic — larger in every dimension than a U67 — and doesn’t fit into generic shockmounts such as the Rycote InVision models. Nor does it have threading that would allow it to be used with a swivel mount, so you have to use the supplied shockmount.

The Royalty is a pretty substantial mic — larger in every dimension than a U67 — and doesn’t fit into generic shockmounts such as the Rycote InVision models. Nor does it have threading that would allow it to be used with a swivel mount, so you have to use the supplied shockmount. This is a nice visual match for the mic, but on the review model, it was very difficult to tighten the bolt that runs through the knuckle joint enough to stop it drooping under the weight of the mic. And, as I very nearly found to my cost, if this joint loses its grip suddenly, the weight of the mic can pull the elastic rings off the shockmount, leaving the mic in freefall.

Overall, I think it’s fair to say that the look and feel of the Royalty will probably divide opinion. Shockmount aside, the build quality seems sound, and the colour scheme is certainly eye‑catching, but personally I’d willingly trade some of the eye candy for a clear visual indication of what switch does what.

Purple Palace

Monheim publish only minimal specifications for the Royalty, among them a signal‑to‑noise ratio of 77dB and an “equivalent noise level” of 8dB, both A‑weighted. It’s not clear what this noise measurement refers to, but it surely is not the microphone’s self‑noise as usually understood; this can be calculated from the SNR as 17dB, which is about what you’d expect for a valve mic. No frequency response or polar pattern charts are provided, but Monheim say that the Royalty has a sensitivity of 24mV/Pa in cardioid and can accept sound pressure levels up to 128dB with the pad engaged, though it’s not stated what level of distortion is reached at this point.

Alas, I don’t have a Neumann U67 for direct comparisons, but I do have the solid‑state U77 and U87, both of which use the same capsule. I found that the Royalty, like many of today’s ‘Neumann‑inspired’ mics, was a little brighter than either of these, especially around the 10kHz area. It would be interesting to set up one of Neumann’s own U67 reissues for a similar comparison; it may be that the high‑end response of my rather elderly mics has somehow become tamed with age, but I suspect that the Royalty would still have a bit more going on up top than its inspiration. This brightness isn’t at all overbearing or unpleasant, and in fact is very welcome on most sources apart from sibilant vocalists and sharp‑sounding percussion instruments.

The main thing that sets the Royalty apart from solid‑state mics using similar capsules is, of course, the use of a valve rather than a FET as the impedance converter. Some mic designers seem to delight in producing circuits that scream “In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a valve mic!”, with obvious thickness and saturation apparent on practically any source. That is not and never was the case with most of the classic designs, including the U67, and I’m pleased to report that Monheim have judged things very nicely. There’s no additional hiss or other noise to give away the presence of the valve, and on quiet sources, you wouldn’t necessarily be aware of it at all. As the SPLs rise and the midrange gets pushed, though, you begin to notice a little pleasing sag and softness that helps to keep the sound smooth.

In most of the K67‑equipped mics I’ve used, the on‑axis frequency response varies noticeably in the different polar patterns. Cardioid delivers the classic ‘sounds like a record’ tonality we’ve come to expect, with a slight forward quality in the midrange and a gentle boost in the air frequencies. Switch to omni and the midrange flattens out, while that air boost is enhanced; and in figure‑8, the high‑frequency emphasis falls an octave or so and becomes more apparent. This is exactly what happens with the Royalty: perhaps to a greater extent than, for example, the UA Bock 167 reviewed elsewhere in this issue, but not more so than on any genuine Neumann mic I’ve used. The tonal variety could come in very handy for those ‘awkward’ vocalists, though in practice I rarely prefer the other patterns to cardioid on any mic of this design.

67 Varieties

The world is not short of mics inspired by the Neumann U67. Neumann’s own reissue, like painstaking replicas from the likes of Wunder Audio, will set you back considerably more than the Royalty. At the other end of the market, you can pick up a Warm Audio WA‑67 for under a grand, while the Royalty competes more or less head‑on with the likes of the Universal Audio UA Bock 167, Peluso P67 and BeezNees B67‑269. I haven’t tried either of the last two, while the UA Bock mic is something of a ‘next generation’ approach to the 67 design, with a deeper low end and slightly more expansive sound.

The Royalty walks the walk as well as talking the talk.

The UA Bock 167 also looks and feels more like a traditional, serious studio tool than the Royalty, which trades the functional German aesthetic of the U67 for something altogether blingier. This invites accusations of prioritising form over function, or looks over sound, but the Royalty walks the walk as well as talking the talk. If it was mine, its sleek purple shell would be unceremoniously plastered with stickers reminding me what all the switches do — but I’d still be pretty happy with the sound that came out the other end.