My next mic purchase is going to be a pair of SDC for stereo recording. I've been leaning towards the AKG 451 but have not seen many pairs being sold, mostly individual mic's. I read somewhere on Shure's website that all SM81's should be close enough in sound that you can use any 2 as a matched pair. Would this be true of the AKG 451's? Is this BS?

i bought a total of three last year. I think two were from ebay and one was from funky junk in the UK. I sent the whole lot of them to AKG to check out. They replaced the cap in a couple and gave the other a clean bill of health. I can use any of them in a pair and they sound great. Two silver bodies, one black....
later,
m

AKG offers their C451B as a matched stereo pair. It has a fixed cardioid capsule that's modelled after their CK1 capsule.
As far as I know the 'Bs are electronically different from 'E's/EB's as they have a transformerless design. The Bs have switches for -10db and high pass filtering but because of the lack of FETs they're quite different from the classic E/EB design. They sound brighter than I remember the originals (already bright) to sound like but I've never heard them in an A/B comparison.
I've had three older C451s with omni and cardioid capsules and they all sounded different. I've kept the ones that sounded closest together and sold the other one with CK1 and CK2 capsule on ebay.
It's weird that the closest match I can get with the two remaining mics is a EB-CK22 and E-CK2 combination.
I can imagine that it's hard to find a matched pair of E/EBs on the used marked.
I'll take a closer look at a matched pair of Josephson's C-42s as soon I can afford to buy new microphones.
Good luck,
Max

max wrote:I'll take a closer look at a matched pair of Josephson's C-42s as soon I can afford to buy new microphones.
Good luck,
Max

The C-42s are a great mic and an amazing bargain., especially the MPs