RIP Trusty Friend, or, Why Patience Is a Virtue

[Jafo]

My SM57 died today following surgery; I'd removed the resonator disc, and in my glee at how fantastic and open my old friend sounded, I wasn't careful enough and accidentally removed the diaphragm on reassembly. Kinda Humpty Dumpty, ya know? Ah well; at least I finally got that midrange spike to disappear. (Along with all the other frequencies.)

[jobromedia]

Care to be more specific? What did you do wrong? Pictures will help those who have the same gear as you have.

[Hink]

my 57 died a while back, I tried surgery with no luck...so I got to thinking, with all the 57s out there surely there must be about one and hour coming up on ebay...my first attempt at chasing one scored me one for under 50 dollars

[Jafo]

Care to be more specific? What did you do wrong? Pictures will help those who have the same gear as you have.

Err, sure, although I was more looking for similar DIY horror stories.

The Shure SM57 is a very standard mic used nearly ubiquitously to record snares and drums and just about everything else. Sometimes used to record vocals (thanks, TweakHeadz Lab), it needs tweaks to be useful, as it has a strident upper midrange boost. The most common mod is to remove the transformer, which is held in place by hot glue. This requires boiling water in a sacrificial pot -- the resins of hot glue are poisonous, and definitely not good eats. Another common is to adjust the impedance so that it's loaded down, thereby tamed. This requires wiring a resistor, chosen to match your preamp, between pins 2 & 3 on the XLR. A third mod, the one which I chose to do, is to remove the resonator disc, which is a circular piece of plastic (ceramic?) with holes drilled in it, causing air within the mic to resonate and give said upper midrange boost. The resonator disc is between the diaphragm and the foam in the grille, and removing it requires the removal of the head.

After some fiddling around, I was able to remove the head (I guess this counts as a mic circumcision), which is held in place by a spring clip. I lifted off the resonator disc, which is held in place merely by pressure. I tested a few scratch tracks in Audacity, and was greatly pleased with the open, natural sound, and wondered why the disc was there in the first place. While lost in my revery, I absent-mindedly just jammed the head back on, and somehow tore loose the diaphragm (a clear circle of mylar with a copper cylinder) -- maybe I used a little too much force (perhaps I was tangled up in blue?), maybe my hand slipped, maybe I just had the wrong angle. Whatever the reason, I now had a loose diaphragm (and we all know how bad that can be, right?) -- it was no longer glued to the barrel of the mic, and (more importantly) the tiny wires connecting the diaphragm to the coil in the mic capsule were severed.

Anyhoo, I hope I understood your request for more specificity. I'm exhausted from insomnia right now, and I suspect I'm being patronizing; if I am, please accept my sincere apologies and a promise to be more careful in the future.

[Jafo]

my 57 died a while back, I tried surgery with no luck...so I got to thinking, with all the 57s out there surely there must be about one and hour coming up on ebay...my first attempt at chasing one scored me one for under 50 dollars

Nice!