Beyerdynamic M 160
A hypercardioid ribbon that engineers reach for when a condenser is the obvious answer and the wrong one.
Overview
The M 160 is a double-ribbon microphone built around the premise that a ribbon can do the work of a condenser without the fuss of one. Beyerdynamic's own literature describes the element as a double-ribbon design responsible for "the unique transparency of sound image that ribbon mics are known for," and the company positioned the mic directly against the finest condensers: performance said to be comparable, but in a compact body that offers what the copy calls significant practical advantages for critical applications. That is advertising, and it should be read as such — but the design intent it describes is specific and consistent with how the mic has actually been used.
The polar pattern is hypercardioid, which is the detail that separates the M 160 from the figure-8 ribbon stereotype. A figure-8 picks up just as enthusiastically behind the mic as in front; a hypercardioid does not. In practice that means the M 160 can be placed close on a loud source without the room behind it arriving in equal measure — the reason it turns up on guitar cabinets and snares rather than only on distant ambience duty. The same hypercardioid character is what makes it the natural partner to Beyerdynamic's figure-8 M 130 in Mid-Side stereo work, a pairing the manufacturer's own literature calls out explicitly: the M 130 supplies the sides, the M 160 the mid, and the two together produce an authentic stereo image.
What the documentation does not supply is the number sheet. No frequency response curve, no sensitivity figure, no impedance, no weight, no dimensions, no connector type, and no original price appear in the source material available to the archive for this model. That is unusual for a microphone this widely used, and it means anything quoted here as a hard specification would be invention. What survives instead is evidence of use — and on that front the record is unusually rich.
Engineers have consistently treated the M 160 as a problem-solver rather than a default. In a Mix-Magazine (June 1983, p.50) advertisement, Beyerdynamic argued the case for ribbon microphones against condensers directly, asking whether an engineer should have to deal with the complexity of a condenser system every time a violin or acoustic piano needs capturing — the M 160 offered as the alternative, its double-ribbon element delivering condenser-comparable performance in a smaller, simpler package. Whether the claim holds is a matter of taste; that the company was willing to make it in print, repeatedly, says something about how confident it was in the mic's transient behavior.
Twentieth-century session documentation backs that up. In Electronic Musician, producer-engineer Tarquin is described miking guitar cabinets with an M-160 placed close and slightly off-axis, often paired with a Neumann M 149 set roughly five feet back for ambience, and in some cases with a Sennheiser MD-421 alongside it. That is a textbook ribbon-on-cabinet approach: the M 160 close for the body and the midrange detail, a distant condenser for the room, and a dynamic for whatever the other two miss. The same publication records the mic on acoustic guitar in a different session, paired with a Neumann U47 — a pairing that puts a ribbon and a classic condenser on the same source and lets the engineer blend.
The M 160's reputation has proven durable enough that it never really left the market. Collectors note that the M 160 occupies a strange position in the used market: old enough to be vintage, current enough that buyers can still compare it against a new one, and common enough on records that its sound is familiar even to people who have never seen one.
That familiarity is the honest case for the mic. It is not a neutral microphone and nobody who uses one claims it is. It is a hypercardioid ribbon with a double element, built by a company that has kept ribbon production alive when most of the industry abandoned it, and used by engineers who want the transient behavior of a ribbon without the figure-8 pickup that normally comes attached. The paperwork on this one is thin — no production years, no price history, no published specification set in the archive's sources — and the page will stay thin until a brochure or service manual surfaces. What can be said without hedging is that the M 160 earned its place in studios the slow way, one cabinet and one acoustic guitar at a time.
eBay Listings
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.