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Hi all,
I've recently picked up a couple of old Beyer MD421HN mics and they have the small Klein Tuchel connector on them. It looks like a small XLR. I hand wired a cable for them and in doing so realized that the pinout is different than the standard XLR.

Where standard XLR is 1 ground, 2 hot, 3 cold
the Tuchel pinout is 1cold, 2, hot, 3 ground

I can't seem to find a cable or even a raw connector for that matter.

Can anyone help a duder out with a link or a company that sells the raw connectors?

A Beyer MD421? Did you mean Sennheiser?

Get them from Ebay.de or your local Ebay if you can.

Just search titles and descriptions for tuchel.

Your Sennheiser MD421 HN has a non-standard pin-out. It is a dual-impedance model. Earth is via the tuchel housing / barrel. I have explained this elsewhere. Search for it.

Since Tuchel (Klein and Groß) was the old German standard broadcast connector, they are pretty common over here.
Look out for DIN connectors or DIN Stecker as well.
I'm sure there are companies in the states that carry them.
You are wrong about the pinout, by the way.

Klein-Tuchel pinout:
Pin 1: hot
Pin 2: ground
Pin 3: cold

Groß-Tuchel pinout:
Pin 1: hot
Pin 2: cold
Pin 3: ground

Those connectors are a pain to solder to a cable because of the way they are fixed to the cable. I recently had to make a couple of Groß-Tuchel cables for my tape machine and it took me ages because I forgot a distance ring here and a connector cover there and had to re-solder and open up most of the connectors before I was done.

max wrote:You are wrong about the pinout, by the way.

Klein-Tuchel pinout:
Pin 1: hot
Pin 2: ground
Pin 3: cold

And so are you! Haha!

Yes, that is the standard Klein Tuchel pin-out for almost every Klein Tuchel microphone, but the Sennheiser HN and HK models are different.

Yeah,
I should start reading posts from start to end.
Now you see what happens when Germans start to internationalize their standards.

I was told the mics are made by Beyer just previous to the Sennheiser, but the same in construction. I was also told that he H means that it was intended to be used (eg) with a domestic tape recorder with mic inputs having mono jack sockets.

A guy I'm trying to purchase a cable from in the UK says:

"Because this microphone is high impedance you will loose high frequencies if you use long cables. You could use a DI box, which is just a mic transformer like what would be inside a low impedance microphone, in which case you need a jack plug. You can use an XLR if you keep the length short and the mic will just have a higher level and so need less gain on a normal preamp."


does this sound right to you all?

As far as I know, Beyer never made mics for Sennheiser.

Does it look like this:

http://www.electrical.com/item.php?page ... /109-0.jpg

In that case, it is a Sennheiser MD421.

What the seller says is almost right. The fact is, if it is an HL or HN model, then you are not going to wire it for high impedance as it has the option for wiring as low impedance too (the same as most MD421s).

On the European models, HN stands for "Hoch-Niedrich" which means High/Low, and similarly the same US model is called an HL which stands for the same thing obviously. The H does not mean "domestic" although high impedance mics were generally more commonly used with old domestic tape recorders and old (60's, 70's) PAs.

As I said before, I have mentioned the pinout here already. Only two of the pins are used for (+) and (-) with earth simply being soldered to the tuchel barrel.

You wouldn't want to use this wired for high impedance because it would have at least the same impedance as most mic preamp inputs. This would cause the mic to be "loaded down" and cause bass loss / tonal change.

it does look like a normal 421 but the grill is only 1/2 inch long as the on in the picture is a couple of inches long.

So i'd essentially want to wire this thing to an unbalanced 1/4 inch? Or am I misunderstanding what you are saying.

Rodabod wrote:As I said before, I have mentioned the pinout here already. Only two of the pins are used for (+) and (-) with earth simply being soldered to the tuchel barrel.

Using the search function, I found this:

http://www.electrical.com/phpBB2/viewto ... ht=md421hl

Go two thirds down:

Roddy wrote:Right, the HL model (high-low) has a tap on the output transformer for low and high impedance. This makes it a little more complicated than usual because there is no earth pin on the mic - you earth via the barrel.

Pin 2 is common and is the cold -ve signal.

Pin 3 is the low impedance tap and is therefore the hot +ve signal

The threaded barrel is earth, so therefore connect the cable shield via the tuchel housing.

Pin 1 has no connection - it is the high impedance tap which you don't want.

You can check this with a multimeter to confirm - pins 2-3 should have less resistance than pins 2-1.

Does that make sense?

Follow what I say above, and remeber that the cable braid goes to the tuchel barrel (hopefully there will be suitable tag to solder to).