Sennheiser MD 511/512
A ProForce-series vocal mic that Sennheiser pitched on gain-before-feedback and durability. The trade magazines only ever showed it in full-page ads.
Overview
The MD 511/512 is one of the harder Sennheiser dynamic mics to pin down, mostly because the paper trail is advertising, not review. The surviving period documentation does establish where the company put it. The MD 511/512 sat in the ProForce line, which Sennheiser marketed squarely at working vocalists. The pitch ran across the trade press through the early 1990s. It promised "award-winning sonic superiority," gain that reached "incredible levels before feedback," and a combination of "new high tech materials" for what the copy called rock-solid durability. That's manufacturer advertising, not an independent verdict. Read it as a statement of intent, not a measurement.
The ProForce family as advertised alongside the MD 511/512 included the MD 515/516 and the MD 518. The numbering is a clue to how Sennheiser structured the range. The 511/512 appears to have been offered as a paired designation, not a single catalog number, and the fact sheet does not say what separates the two halves of the pair. "MD 511/512" is the designation to search on. Don't assume the 511 and 512 are interchangeable variants without documentation in hand.
The advertising does say one thing consistently: Sennheiser built these to survive the road. The "laser-age manufacturing techniques" line was the company's way of arguing that the ProForce mics were cheap to make without being cheap in construction. The explicit claim was that cost control came from the production method while "sound and ruggedness" stayed uncompromised. Whether that held up in service is something only long-term owners can say, and there is no independent service history in the available record.
Mix (January 1994, p.119) and EQ Magazine (February 1994, p.31) both carried the ProForce campaign through early 1994, and the EQ placement is the more interesting of the two: it ran a limited-time promotion in which buying any ProForce MD 511/51 microphone — the OCR is imperfect on the trailing digit — came with a free set of Sennheiser HD 435 headphones, while the MD 515/516 buyers got HD 440 II headphones instead. That's a useful piece of dating evidence as much as anything: the MD 511/512 was still being actively pushed at dealer level in the first half of 1994, and the headphone bundle tells you Sennheiser was cross-selling its own monitoring line to studio and stage customers alike.
This is a microphone whose reputation was made in the pages of the trade magazines, not on their test benches. No independent measurement of the MD 511/512's frequency response, sensitivity, or polar pattern appears in the period record available here. The fact sheet carries no specifications at all - no impedance figure, no weight, no original list price. A buyer today is evaluating Sennheiser's own claims plus whatever the condition of the individual example shows. That's not a knock on the mic. Plenty of good working dynamics have thin paper trails.
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