AKG C 12B
Everybody name-drops this microphone and almost nobody can document it. It belongs to the C12 family, and its reputation is inherited rather than proven.
Overview
Ask a room full of recording engineers to list their favorite microphones and the AKG C12 lands near or at the top. That's what Mix-Magazine (March 1995, p.134) said when it field-tested the C12VR, the modern tube condenser built to evoke the original. The same test notes that the C12VR's designers deliberately copied the classic C12's frequency response lift between roughly 3 and 18 kHz, with two or three smooth peaks whose intensity shifts with the selected polar pattern. That's the family sound. The C 12B gets credit for it by association, because it sits inside the C12 lineage without being the model that defined it.
The C 12B is not a well-specified product, at least in the documentation available here. Capsule type, tube complement, polar pattern options, transformer configuration, frequency response, self-noise, and original retail price are all unverified in this archive's sources. The production years are unconfirmed too. A page that invented those numbers would read better and be worth less. Anyone chasing a C 12B should assume they are buying on the family name and the physical condition of the unit in front of them, not on a datasheet they can look up afterward.
There is one more period source. Mix-Magazine (March 1982, p.24) surveyed the then-current crop of studio microphones and described manufacturers racing to meet the demands of digital recording. The piece highlights AKG's top-of-the-line models delivering working dynamic range figures above 124 dB and signal-to-noise ratios in the mid-70s dB range per DIN standards. Those numbers belong to the 1982 AKG catalog, not to the C 12B, and this archive won't pretend otherwise. They do show that the company behind the C 12B spent the following decades pushing on noise floor and headroom.
The C 12B is remembered because of the family it belongs to. The C12 lineage is the reason anyone cares, and the C 12B is one of the branches. Whether that justifies current asking prices is up to each buyer. This archive can't answer it, because the documentation isn't there.
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