Alesis AM52 (1998)
A mid-priced Class A FET condenser that reviewers kept reaching for — and kept having to sing around.
Overview
Here's a microphone that arrived by way of a detour. Alesis built its name on signal processors, drum machines, sequencers, synthesizers, tape recorders, and studio monitors, and by the late nineties it had pushed into mixers too. In 1998 the company acquired the Groove Tubes line of electronics, brought designer Aspen Pittman aboard, and stood up a new division called GT Electronics. The first thing out of that division was the AM Series — four large-diaphragm condensers aimed straight at the crowded middle of the mid-priced condenser market. The AM52 sat near the top of the solid-state half of the line, priced at $699, with the cardioid-only AM51 below it at $549 and the tube-driven AM61 and AM62 above at $999 and $1,299.
What separates the AM52 from its tube siblings is the circuit. It's a Class A FET design, and where the tube models used a nickel-core output transformer from Cinemag, the 52 and the 51 make do with a more standard ferrite-core transformer. It's the flagship multipattern model of the FET pair — the AM51 is cardioid-only, while the 52 carries a two-sided diaphragm that lets it switch between cardioid, bidirectional, and omni. The shared hardware across the AM Series is genuinely uncommon at this price: a brass capsule measuring more than an inch across, a 3-micron gold-evaporated-on-mylar diaphragm, and a gold-plated center element that works like the old whizzer-cone trick in speaker design, setting up a tiny acoustical resonance circuit to lift high-frequency and transient response.
The character is the thing owners talk about, and it's not a flat response. That same brightness made it a poor fit for close-miking inside a piano, but the magazine noted the very quality that hurt there could make it ideal for mid- to far-field work, compensating for air absorption of high frequencies. On bells and ethnic percussion it outperformed its tube sibling; on agogos and other loud close-miked sources it could splatter a little in the high mids. On vibraphone it produced a bright sound that didn't over-accentuate the mallet transient, though it couldn't match a dedicated small-diaphragm pair for pinpoint imaging.
The field-test anecdotes are the best argument for the mic. Recording a touring group of ten Tibetan nuns at Outpost, engineer David Nelson's first impression of the AM52 was that it was "crispy" — he feared the tracks would sound artificial — but as he soloed mics to build a blend he kept looking up at sounds he liked and finding the 52 underneath them, and he grew steadily more enamored of both the 52 and the 62 as the session wore on. Producer Candice Pacheco, working a later session with the same group, set the 52 to bidirectional with a singer on either side and found the GT mics handled the ensemble's pronounced 4 kHz nasal resonance and instrument bleed better than the other microphones on hand, calling the 52 very nice for the price and a good choice on a budget.
Collectors should treat this as a working tool rather than a trophy. It's a specific, opinionated microphone from a company that was, as EQ (1999, p.83) observed, becoming close to a one-stop shop by folding the Groove Tube line into its catalog — and the AM52 is one of the more interesting artifacts of that expansion.
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