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The Fralins are awesome, but the Duncan Vintage Alnicos are excellent also.
If you want glass there's lots of it and smooth as can be in either case.

Having said that, the guitar itself usaully has as much to do with the sound.

I've had very good luck ordering parts from Michael in the past.

I have a Beyer Soundstar II and would consider it a very underated mic for its price. A working one should sound great.

I'll bet you could plug the 3 mics into a different preamp and it would completely change the results.

Oh yeah, one more thing, I called both places and asked for a schematic since they won't fix it, both refused.

Good Luck... I have a U97 that crapped out. I called Soundelux and they wouldn't deal with it, referred me to another guy who works on the u97's and u99's. I called the guy and he told me these mics had a problem that cannot be fixed, unless you modify the mic to only one pattern (for a price of cou...

The B77 is an excellent machine- kind of a consumer version of their more pro stuff, but better made than a lot of other pro stuff. Excellent sound quality. Make sure the heads are good-these tended to wear a little faster than some others, although I believe replacements are available (for a price)...

Jason,

You're not hearing things!
Electrolytics in particular often need to "settle out". I run pink noise
for 10 or 20 hours through gear after re-capping.
I have even noticed this effect with poypro caps depending on where they are in the circuit and the type of circuit.

I have owned and worked on lots of old Ampeg amps, including owning a couple of VT22's at various times. Ampegs are not intrinsically unreliable. In fact they are extremely well built. The problem is that many of these ran so well for so long that maintenance that should have been performed long ago...

I think it really depends on which GC you're shopping at. The two here in Minneapolis can be OK (if you can take the noise) but certainly capable of bad buying voodoo. But then again there was a MARS store here for a while and that was BAD. The absolute worst customer service, impossible to get help...

I had Dick Gardner re-ribbon mine about 10 years ago and he dida great job. Nice guy too....

If its working and the heads aren't worn this is a great deck. Can be converted to 1/2 track if it isn't already. Chack tubes and replace electrolytic caps.

I used one for a while and while not the ultimate in fidelity I have heard some great stuff come off from these. Definitely capable of some very cool results. And I'll echo the part about them currently being a steal....

4060 is a very nice mic. Very smooth, more transparent than a lot of tube mics.

Audio Technica 4033 is a good general purpose mic. Excellent on acoustic
guitar, percussion, good on drum overhead, bass,vocals,guitar amps.