Neumann KM140
A small-diaphragm condenser whose capsule unscrews from its body. That trick made it a broadcast and remote-recording favorite.
Overview
Look at the narrow base below the barrel. That's an XLR connector, and it's the reason the KM140 looks the way it does. The capsule housing is longer than the body it sits on, because the active electronics live up in the capsule head. The head can be detached and remoted on an extension, which makes the mic useful for television work and other lavalier-style jobs where the body can't go where the capsule needs to be. Mix (July 1995, p.171) laid out the geometry plainly: apart from that narrow XLR-connector base, the KM140 and its sibling share the same cylindrical shape and diameter. The KM140 is the shorter of the two because its longer capsule housing carries the active electronics.
The detachable head has a cost. The same Mix field test (July 1995, p.171) noted that the active capsule arrangement produces a slightly different acoustical coupling to the rest of the mic body. Neumann's own sales manager attributed the difference to the separated electronics. So the KM140 is not simply a body with a capsule screwed on, and the split changes how it sounds. Collectors who have spent time with both the KM140 and its fixed-capsule relative describe the two as subtly different rather than interchangeable. The reasons are both electrical and acoustical.
The cardioid-only sibling, per that same review, does not offer interchangeable capsules the way the KM140 does. The KM140's head can be swapped. The KM140 also carries a 10 dB pad that the fixed-capsule version lacks. That helps on location when a hot source or a distant placement calls for attenuation at the capsule rather than at the console. The reviewer's point was that padding at the mixer is always possible, but pre-attenuating the capsule's output electronics is sometimes the only way to keep the front end from distorting.
A 1993 Studio Sound studio inventory (August 1993) lists four KM140s alongside a pair of TLM170s, a pair of TLM50s, U87Ais, a U89, and a stack of vintage tube Neumanns. That's a mic locker where the small condensers are the workhorses and the tube mics come out for the money tracks. The KM140 sat in that company, which says something about how the model was regarded in serious classical and broadcast work.
Pricing shows up in the classifieds of the era. Treat those as period street and asking prices rather than catalog figures. Dealer ads and private listings in the back of a trade magazine are a rough guide, not a price list. They do show that the KM140 sat well above budget small-diaphragm condensers and was priced as professional gear.
A buyer today should know the usual caution with any modular capsule microphone: the value is in the head, and heads get lost, swapped, and separated from bodies over decades. A KM140 offered without its original capsule, or with a head of uncertain provenance, is a different proposition from a complete one. The detachable design that makes the mic versatile also makes incomplete examples common. The record here is thin - no production years, no factory specifications, no service history - so this page sticks to what the period documents show and doesn't fill in numbers that can't be sourced.
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