Rebuilding an Electro-Voice RE20 microphone

The blog has been a little bit Drupal-heavy the past couple months, as I've been stalled a bit in terms of my 'maker'-style projects and other hardware-based projects. The main reason for that is this guy:

I'm halfway through rebuilding/re-foaming an old Electro-Voice RE20, beloved by many a radio personality, and the process has taken a bit longer than I expected!

I've been doing a lot more screencasts lately, and as part of my retooling of my downstairs office for better screencast quality, I'm also trying to get the best possible audio recordings. The RE20 is one of the best mics I've ever used in terms of taking a not-professional-voice (like mine) and making it sound halfway decent.

I have a few old beat up RE20 mics in a box, and I've been testing each one out to see how they sound—it's amazing the variance after 20+ years in service at local radio stations! I'm working on a very detailed blog post on the process of tearing them down, cleaning them up, replacing the foam innards, and then re-testing them to see if I can get them close to their original specs (or at least better than they were initially!).

I'm excited that I'm nearly finished re-foaming the first (and most disgusting) mic. In the picture at the top of this post you can see it stripped down to the base elements—the body, the mic capsule, and the head of the mic (which is shown fixed here—it was originally pretty banged up!). I have a ton more pictures, and will likely produce a video of the repair process too, so stay tuned!