Telefunken ELAM-251
The tube condenser that working engineers name in the same breath as the U47 and C-12. Classified ads have chased it for decades with a single word: CALL.
Overview
A certain line shows up in the back pages of recording trade magazines, again and again, across years and across brokers. It's a list of Neumanns, a list of Schoeps, a list of AKGs, and then, sitting among the RCA 77DXs and the Teletronix LA-2As, "Telefunken: ELAM 251." No price. Just the name and a phone number. When a seller won't print a number, the number is whatever the market will bear that week, and the market has never been shy about the ELAM 251.
Functionally, the ELAM 251 is a multipattern tube condenser microphone. Mix (April 1994, p.112) put it plainly: leading engineers and producers, when asked about their favorite vocal mics, tend to reach for the same short list - Neumann U47s, AKG C12s, Telefunken ELAM-251s, RCA 77DXs, Sony C-37As. It is not a curiosity, not a sleeper, not a bargain hiding in a pawn shop. It is one of the handful of large-diaphragm tube condensers that the recording industry collectively decided were the good ones.
The reputation comes with a cost, and the cost is the problem. Mix (April 1994, p.112) also noted the flip side of vintage tube mic ownership: performance between two supposedly identical examples can vary considerably, because tubes, capacitors, diaphragms, and ribbons all eventually succumb to time. That's not a knock on the ELAM 251 specifically. It's true of any sixty-year-old microphone with a tube inside it. A clean one and a tired one carry the same model number and are wildly different tools.
What the Name Actually Means
This is where the ELAM 251 gets confusing, and where a lot of listings get sloppy. The microphone collectors call the "Telefunken ELAM 251" is frequently written in the period documentation as the ELA M251E or ELA M250E - the multipatterned Telefunken ELA M251E/250E. Mix (October 2001, p.184), in a field test of a modern recreation, refers to "the multipatterned Telefunken ELA M251E/250E" as one of the three most sought-after tube condenser microphones, ranked alongside the Neumann U47 and the AKG C-12. Note the pairing: 251E and 250E. The 250 and the 251 are cardioid and multipattern versions of the same design lineage, and in the used market the names blur together. If a seller lists an "ELAM 251," ask which pattern complement is actually on the badge.
That same Mix field test (October 2001, p.184) sets a price of $5,000 for the modern recreation. It also describes the recreation's transformer as having a secondary turns ratio matching the original Tele, providing a more uniform impedance versus frequency than the original. So the copy claims an improvement over the vintage unit in one narrow respect, impedance linearity, while using the same plated/loaded amplifier circuit as the original with "tweaked" part values. That's a manufacturer's claim about a reissue, not a verdict on the original.
The reissue market around this microphone is big enough to treat on its own.
The Reissue Economy
By the early 2000s, the ELAM 251 had become expensive and scarce enough that multiple companies built tributes. Soundelux shipped the ELUX 251, explicitly described as modeled after the classic Telefunken ELAM 251 and offering the same performance as vintage models at significantly lower cost, with hand-built, hand-tuned European capsules, tube and transformer circuitry, and point-to-point wiring with each component individually prescreened for sonic quality. EQ (July 2001, p.60) covered the ELUX 251 under the framing of "a classic is reborn," noting that while recording technology had made major low-noise, high-headroom strides toward 24/96, microphone technology had been slower to catch up. Sound on Sound (August 2003, p.181) listed the Soundelux ELUX 251 tube at £3525, describing it as recreating the fabled Telefunken ELAM 251. In the same roundup, the Soundelux E47 was £2702 and the CAD VX2 dual tube was £1527.
What that price spread tells you is that the tribute market itself has tiers, and that the ELUX 251 sat at the top of the Soundelux range. It also tells you something about the original: nobody builds a £3525 microphone to chase a sound nobody wants.
The secondhand trade in the real thing ran on a different logic. In the classified pages of Recording Engineer, dealers listed the ELAM 251 alongside Neumann U47 tubes, U67s, KM56s, KM64s, U64s, SM69 FETs, M49s, Schoeps M221 tubes, and AKG C28A/C28C/C61/C12/D15/D20/D30, and quoted prices for nearly all of them. The Neumann U-87s went for $1,200. The AKG C12A tube went for $1,500, the C414B for $650, the Pultec EQP-1A for $1,800. Against all those printed numbers, the ELAM 251 entry reads "mint, CALL." Twice, in two separate issues, from two separate brokers.
Why Engineers Keep Coming Back
The ELAM 251 occupies a specific sonic territory that a lot of people find useful on voices, and the industry's judgment on that has been remarkably stable. Mix (April 1994, p.112) framed the entire vocal microphone field as having changed surprisingly little over the preceding fifteen years, with vintage models still the reference points that working engineers cite. That's a 1994 observation about a microphone that was already decades old at the time.
It is not a plug-and-play purchase. The variance problem Mix flagged in 1994 - tubes, capacitors, and diaphragms all degrading at different rates in different units - means that two ELAM 251s from the same production era can behave like different microphones. Anyone shopping for one is shopping for a specific example, not a model. Condition, service history, and whether the capsule has been reskinned all matter more than the badge.
The badge itself needs a hard look. The design is documented in period literature as the ELA M251E/250E, and the reissue market has spent two decades building tributes under names like the ELUX 251, so listings that say "Telefunken ELAM 251" cover a lot of ground. Buyers who know the difference between an original and a tribute, and between a 250 and a 251, are the ones who don't get burned.
Buying One Today
This is a microphone you buy from a broker, a studio liquidation, or another engineer, not from a retail shelf. The classified-ad culture around it in the 1980s and 1990s, where dealers ran standing "we buy used recording equipment of all kinds" notices and listed the ELAM 251 with no price at all, never really went away. It moved online. Expect to make phone calls. Expect the price to be a conversation.
For anyone who can't justify the original, the tribute route is well-documented. The Soundelux ELUX 251 was independently reviewed and priced in the period press, so there's a paper trail a buyer can check: EQ (July 2001, p.60), Mix (October 2001, p.184), Sound on Sound (August 2003, p.181).
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