AKG D-119
A dynamic that turns up in the stock lists of British hi-fi shops, priced alongside ribbon mics and headphones.
Overview
The D-119 is one of those AKG dynamics that did its job quietly and faded into the background. It shows up repeatedly in the equipment listings of Studio Sound through the mid-to-late 1960s. The sellers were London-area tape-and-hi-fi dealers, and they stocked it alongside Grampian ribbons, Reslo dynamics, and the occasional Grundig mixer. That's the stock list of a shop that also sold Garrard turntables and Wharfedale speakers, not where you'd expect a serious studio microphone. It tells you how the D-119 was positioned. It was a working microphone, sold to working people, priced to move.
Pricing is the most concrete thing the surviving documentation gives us. In a Studio Sound dealer listing from June 1965 (p.83), the D-119 was quoted at £24 10s. That's noticeably more than the AKG D.19C at £17 10s and the D.14S at £10, but a fair bit less than the Grampian condenser at 29 guineas. By February 1966 the same dealer listed it at £20 10s, and by the following year it had settled around £20. That's a real drop in about eighteen months, and it suggests the D-119 was being repositioned as newer models came into the catalog. The £20 figure is probably the more representative street price of the period than the £24 10s opening ask.
The documentation doesn't say what the D-119 sounded like. There's no frequency response curve, no polar pattern, no impedance figure in the surviving material. What we do have is AKG's own advertising from this era, which leaned hard on the D-24E as the flagship dynamic. The Audio ads from March and December 1966 (p.9 and p.29) push the D-24E as the choice of "foremost entertainers," with individually plotted response curves supplied per unit. The D-119 doesn't get that treatment. It was the mid-tier option, and it was sold as such.
The company behind it was not a mid-tier operation. According to an Audio profile from March 1975 (p.14), AKG - Akustische und Kino-Gerate GmbH - was founded by Dr. R. Gorike and Herr E. Pless to build film projectors. It only got into microphones because projector noise made directional miking a necessity. The D-12 cardioid of 1953 put them on the map, and from there the D-11, D-19, D-24 and D-119 became, in that publication's words, "a familiar sight in recording studios throughout the world." The D-119 sat in the same family as the mics that built AKG's reputation.
Studio Sound (June 1965, p.83) priced the D-119 at £24 10s in a dealer listing that also carried the D.19C at £17 10s and the D.14S at £10 — a useful snapshot of where it sat in the AKG dynamic hierarchy at the time. Later listings in the same publication show the price softening to around £20 by 1966–67, which is consistent with a model being worked down the range as newer designs arrived.
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