An expensive lesson I will share with you

[ajay_m]

I'm gonna write this one off as a 'teachable moment' and it is the direct consequence of naivety on my part (and very possibly at least one other person).

I had the opportunity to purchase a Neumann TLM102 mic from someone I knew personally who, due to personal circumstances, was rationalising their studio. We agreed a fair price and I inspected the mic when I picked it up. It was in the original packaging with a shockmount along with the Neumann safety information leaflet and also a mounting screw adaptor.

When I got home, not being an expert on Neumann mics, I looked up some material such as the SOS review. But then I came across a post on fake Neumann mics. Hmm. A close inspection of the mic showed that one 'tell' - a recessed mounting screw - was present. Disassembling the grille revealed that indeed the capsule was completely wrong and attached to a small circuit board in the base that also did not match the correct board.

I do not believe the seller knew this mic was fake, to be honest. Nor, due to their personal circumstances right now, do I intend to take the matter up with them. It was entirely my responsibility to be aware of the industrial scale faking of microphones; something I was dimly aware of but had no idea how thorough the fakers are.

In this case the packaging looks absolutely legitimate and has the expected barcodes etc as a sticker. The printing is clear and the quality is excellent. The mic itself feels substantial and the build quality seems good, as is the case for the shockmount. But they are both absolutely fake. Interestingly there is a 1 inch capsule in the mic and it does (I haven't personally tested this one) work apparently quite well according to folks out there.

I wasn't intrinsically suspicious because the 102 is not a premium Neumann mic and it simply hadn't occurred to me that there would be so many fakes - but, sadly, there are industrial quantities of them out there. If you look very closely at the packaging there is a tiny sticker with Chinese characters attached. Had I seen that I might have realised, but again, I was completely taken in by the packaging which was so thoroughly done.

I'd be happy to donate this to SOS perhaps, if there could be an article on fake mics. It'd be fascinating to see how it racks up against the real thing, too. Then of course, alas, it probably ought to be destroyed, though I guess the shockmount could be salvaged as an after-market unit - that can't do much harm, I suppose.

This reminds me of the 'round pound' debacle. While the government officially told us that forged pounds would be made out of pieces of lead covered with tinfoil and the queen's head stuck on upside-down, what they knew (but did not share with us) was that forgers in Eastern Europe had perfected the process for making counterfeit pound coins that were almost indistinguishable from the real thing, even under a microscope. This is why the new pound coin was rushed into circulation.

Now Chinese fakery isn't new, but for truly large brands (like Casio calculators), the owner of the brand seems to have sufficient leverage that most of the fakes don't dare actually use the brand name; same for the 'Galaxy' watches on eBay. They don't dare use Samsung anywhere in their branding. But for smaller companies like Neumann, who presumably lack the resources to police their brand, forgers can create incredibly accurate replicas. It's not clear why the screw 'tell' is still present when it would be trivially easy to rectify this, so it's entirely possible that newer forgeries even have the right screw, making it even harder to tell unless you disassemble the grille to look at the capsule and circuit board.

Anyway, I share my tale to warn you, though I know many of you will be shaking your heads and saying 'how could he not know this?'. Nonetheless I did not, and naively thought I could spot a fake - obviously, in the absence of any packaging, I might have been more cautious, but again, I stress, I do believe the seller legitimately thought this to be genuine and there is no suggestion of fraud on their part. That goes further back down the chain unfortunately. In the interim, be warned. The problem seems to be primarily Neumann and Shure mics as I understand it, but anything popular and reasonably expensive is likely to be targetted, and possibly even more inexpensive mics - this sounds crazy, but cheap Casio fake scientific calculators are all over the place and these aren't high-value items. There only has to be a few bucks arbitrage on these and it's worth it to Chinese forgers, and recall due to all the outsourced mic manufacture in China they have tons of perfectly good capsules and amplifier boards, plus the metalworking machinery, to make very, very good copies, possibly even using the original CNC and CAD diagrams filched from a legitimate manufacturer.

Of course Neumann don't make mics in China so these forgers had to reverse engineer from an existing range of mics - they even make fake wooden boxes for the high end ones - it's quite remarkable. I am somewhat poorer and wiser. Be careful out there, folks!

[RichardT]

It’s easily done Ajay!

[Martin Walker]

A salutary tale Ajay, and thanks for all the detail.

I hope at least that this mic will prove usable to you though, even if it's not the real thing - to be honest, if you're convinced that the person you bought it from didn't know either, then it must sound at least reasonably good.

[ManFromGlass]

I agree - the mic might be useful so I would give it a good testing. You might have lucked out and it could sound wonderful on certain things. Your Not-Neumann could still be a good mic.

[James Perrett]

You'll almost certainly find that it is useful for some things. I've got a budget Chinese Stagg LDC mic here which sounds great on certain acoustic guitars - but not so good on others. Good expensive mics tend to be more versatile than cheaper mics but cheaper mics can still win out on some sources.

[Philbo King]

If you want to keep it and be scrupulously honest, replace the Neuman badge with one that says Ajay.

[Hugh Robjohns]

I believe if you message Neumann support with the serial no they can confirm if it's real or not.

I'm always a little wary of the online fake or real pages just because the few who really know what they're talking about are often fighting the noise of other internet opinions. And models can evolve batch to batch.

That said, it does sound like your friend got caught out and some of the fakes these days are extremely convincing. There's no substitute for buying from known reputable retailers with genuine access to the brand.

It seems there's no market someone in China isn't keen to desecrate.

[ajay_m]

Well it gives me the idea for a song "got those fake microphone blues". Bit like "United breaks guitars" as a concept. Thanks everybody. I'm more amused with my own naivety than anything else, to be honest. We all think we're so smart and then somebody comes along and pulls a fast one on us. And then you start wondering, what's fake and what's real?. Its like that wonderful Philip K Dick SF story "Second Variety" (which I think you can read online) , and I think he'd be fascinated with the incredible lengths people take now to make replicas.

[OneWorld]

So, had the friend not been using the mike and if so wasn't aware it was inferior?

[ajay_m]

Well that is a good question but from what I can gather, these fake mics do basically work and while there will be differences compared to a real TLM102 they do have a 1 inch capsule of reasonable quality and unless you were really familiar with Neumann microphones, as far as I can determine, you aren't going to immediately see an issue. I don't believe he used it much, though, either.

A lot of effort must have gone into making all these fakes; the packaging is very convincing indeed as well. As I understand it currently, Neumann and Shure are the primary targets but it wouldn't surprise me to see other makes targetted if there's money in it for the fakers. What a world we live in, eh!.

[Arpangel]

How well do you know this person? I can honestly tell you that if this happened to me, and I bought it from any of my genuine friends, or they bought it from me, we’d have no issue at all about shaking hands and returning the money, and it was a genuine mistake, no one is to blame.

[OneWorld]

How well do you know this person? I can honestly tell you that if this happened to me, and I bought it from any of my genuine friends, or they bought it from me, we’d have no issue at all about shaking hands and returning the money, and it was a genuine mistake, no one is to blame.

Seems the obvious thing to do. If I had sold a fake or faulty kit to a friend, that friend would consider me a fake friend if I didn't immediately offer to give the money back, unless of course I'd been using it happily for goodness knows how many years. Or I suppose an equally equitable resolution would be to offer part of the money back

[Arpangel]

How well do you know this person? I can honestly tell you that if this happened to me, and I bought it from any of my genuine friends, or they bought it from me, we’d have no issue at all about shaking hands and returning the money, and it was a genuine mistake, no one is to blame.

Seems the obvious thing to do. If I had sold a fake or faulty kit to a friend, that friend would consider me a fake friend if I didn't immediately offer to give the money back, unless of course I'd been using it happily for goodness knows how many years. Or I suppose an equally equitable resolution would be to offer part of the money back

Oh dear, if this was my old dad who bought it, he did have quite basic standards about these sort of things.

[OneWorld]

How well do you know this person? I can honestly tell you that if this happened to me, and I bought it from any of my genuine friends, or they bought it from me, we’d have no issue at all about shaking hands and returning the money, and it was a genuine mistake, no one is to blame.

Seems the obvious thing to do. If I had sold a fake or faulty kit to a friend, that friend would consider me a fake friend if I didn't immediately offer to give the money back, unless of course I'd been using it happily for goodness knows how many years. Or I suppose an equally equitable resolution would be to offer part of the money back

Oh dear, if this was my old dad who bought it, he did have quite basic standards about these sort of things.

Was your 'old dad' a musician too? I come from a long line of performers, I don't make a song and dance about it though

[ajay_m]

As I said, there are personal reasons this person is selling stuff off and believe me, you would not want to burden someone in their situation with an issue like this. Sometimes you just have to move on. Yes, 99.9% of the time of course I would just quietly resolve the situation, but there are scenarios where that would be entirely inappropriate and this is one of them.

[OneWorld]

As I said, there are personal reasons this person is selling stuff off and believe me, you would not want to burden someone in their situation with an issue like this. Sometimes you just have to move on. Yes, 99.9% of the time of course I would just quietly resolve the situation, but there are scenarios where that would be entirely inappropriate and this is one of them.

So, in a roundabout way, you've had the opportunity to do a good deed and got a mic thrown in too