The $80 Mic That Refuses to Die
It has been in production since 1979, it costs less than a decent set of cables, and it turns up on records its makers would never guess. In praise of the Halden 55D, and a warning about the bit that always breaks.
There is a flight case at Northlight Studios with fourteen microphones in it, and nine of them cost more than my car. The two that actually leave the case most weeks cost seventy-nine dollars each.
The Halden 55D is a cardioid dynamic that Halden Electroacoustic, a nine-person outfit in Trondheim, has been building essentially unchanged since 1979. It arrives in a printed cardboard sleeve with a foam windscreen and a plastic clip. No case, no shockmount, no serial-numbered frequency plot. There is a microphone, it weighs 310 grams, and it will still work after you drop it down a stairwell. I know that last part the way you would expect me to know it.
What eighty dollars actually buys
Not flatness. The 55D has a broad presence lift of roughly 5 dB centred near 4.5 kHz and a low end that starts sagging around 90 Hz and gives up below 60. On paper that is a public-address microphone, which is exactly what Halden built it to be. In a room, it is a machine for pushing one loud thing to the front and quietly deleting everything behind it.
That deletion is the feature. Put it on a guitar cabinet in a rehearsal room with a concrete floor and it hears the speaker and almost nothing else. Put it inside a kick drum and the missing sub is a problem you solve with the kick's own tuning instead of a shelf. Put it under a snare and the 4.5 kHz bump does the job people buy a compressor to fake.
Ask around and it turns up in places that make no sense on a spec sheet. Nadia Volt's lead vocal on Overcurrent is a 55D into a preamp with a cracked front panel. The eight voices on Cathedral of Small Sounds were tracked on two of them gaffered to a broom handle. Koji Marlowe owns eleven and cannot tell you where nine of them came from.
Halden 55D
Cardioid dynamic, 79 dollars new and about 45 used. Ugly, indifferent to abuse, wrong for quiet sources and correct for almost everything else. Buy two, because you will want a pair before the month is out.
What the manual gets wrong
The manual is four folded pages and about half of it is actively unhelpful.
It instructs you to keep a working distance of no less than 30 centimetres. That is feedback advice for a lectern, and following it on a record throws away the most useful thing the microphone does. At 5 centimetres the proximity effect returns everything the rolloff took away, and it returns it with a weight that no EQ curve replicates. The whole design makes sense only when you are close to it.
The polar plot is a tidy textbook cardioid. In practice the rear rejection is excellent up to about 4 kHz and then falls apart, so the null behind the capsule works as a high-mid filter you aim rather than a null. Point the back of the mic at the hi-hat, not at the wall.
Finally, the manual recommends the supplied foam windscreen for vocals. The foam costs you a couple of dB above 10 kHz on a microphone that does not have a couple of dB to spare. Use a proper pop screen and keep the foam for outdoors.
What breaks, and when
Almost nothing, and then always the same four things.
- The switch. Units built before 1994 have a slide switch on the body. It will crackle, and cleaner will buy you a month. Buy a switchless one, or have it bridged.
- The internal foam. Somewhere around year twenty-five the damping foam behind the capsule turns to crumbs and rattles at high SPL. Two grub screws with a 1.5 mm hex key, tip the crumbs out, cut a new ring from open-cell foam. Fifteen minutes.
- The clip. Everyone's clip is cracked. Four dollars.
- The grille. Dents, cosmetically, forever. A socket of the right size pushes them back out. Nobody will notice either way.
The transformer, the capsule and the XLR barrel do not fail. I have never met a dead 55D. I have met plenty of dead cables blamed on one.
Who actually needs one
Anyone recording a loud source in a room they cannot fix. That is most people: a rehearsal space, a bedroom with a wardrobe in it, the back of a van. Two 55Ds and a hundred-dollar interface is a real recording rig, not a compromise, and the money you do not spend on a third microphone should go on a stand that does not creep.
Who should not bother: anyone tracking a nylon-string guitar played quietly, anyone who wants a room mic on strings, anyone whose record depends on air above 12 kHz. The 55D does not have air. It has a chest and a nose and a hard stop, and it will hand you those three things all day for the price of a takeaway.
Wire's gear column runs on reader money rather than review units we forget to send back. If that arrangement suits you, it works better with you in it.
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