M49 announcement and reminder on all WA mods!
- chaddavidkelly
- Nov 6
- 4 min read
Well, we decided to finally pull the trigger and begin preparations to release our take on the highly venerated M49. We sent out a very limited email/newsletter a few days ago exclusively for the people who had asked to be notified when we had decided to pull the trigger, and invite them to be first in line if they would like to put a 50% deposit down on the M49. I am now extending that to a few more people who may be interested and making that announcement publicly here in the form of a blog.
We are arranging metalwork deposits this month and going into production either in December or right after the CNY, with anticipation of having metalwork finished by May or June 2026 and metalworks in hand by June or July 2026. This is how long this stuff takes, nothing much can be done about it; but for those who want to put down a deposit early, it at least means you will be first on the list when these start going into production. I will be making these fully by hand, in a very time consuming fashion, and so being among the first makes sense for those who won't want to wait longer... because the people on that preorder list will be my first and primary focus until all of those are shipped out. I won't start on other orders until after those early adopters are taken care of.
A bit about the M49.
We decided to base our model around the Revision 3 of the original M49, because it was the most stable and low noise version. However, it has a number of tweaks and easter eggs. We looked at several areas where the voicing, bandwidth, or performance could be tweaked on the high-z section and have implemented a few of these things, all based on known and documented work that has a history of being done with the M49. The transformer will be a custom wound USA-made PCB-footprint adapted version of the classic German BV11. There are a couple of different very good NOS tubes that we have in stock which we can use, and the circuit is flexible enough to allow this. The stock capsule will be a selected K49 we developed with our capsule designer for SAE; although there will also be an economical M7, the OPR M7, and OPR K47 available for slightly extra if desired... but the mic is designed around the custom K49 we developed for it.
The pattern selection will be the classic 3 position switch that the original had (omni, cardioid, figure 8) and derived in the same way; although for a slight additional charge we will be able to add a fully variable 12 position pattern selector circuit for those who want more flexibility.
There will also be a solid state version off the M49 developed alongside it that is phantom powered, for those who want an M49 to be more 'on the go' and more cost effective. The circuit design is loosely based on the U47 FET circuit but with a much more expensive gold-pinned transistor as the basis, and a transformer and output capacitor design that is closer in style to the M49, and of course based on the same capsule.
Links to the pre-order deposit on the M49 are below: I will probably cut this off after a few more people take advantage of it because I don't want the pre-order list to exceed a dozen folks or so. This price also has a built in early bird discount, as I expect the cost to build these to climb up considerably as I get into it... It's not so much the base materials cost; but there are now tarrifs and logistics costs that were not as much of a consideration in the past, and more so the labor involved is rather extreme. I expect it to be very time consuming indeed.
Reminder about the last call on all WA-mods.
As hopefully everyone knows by now, our long time technician Antonio has moved on to bigger and better things, and we will subsequently be downsizing the offerings of Signal Art as I will be running 'solo' now and am very limited in both time and real estate. I will be focusing only on the fully handcrafted builds and the administration of the company, and thus all of the much-beloved WA tube mic mods have been phased out by year's end. My original plan was to end them by Oct 31 but because there were a number of stragglers still on the fence, I extended it to year's end but not a day further. I will be doing all the final mods personally and as time permits, with them all now shipping to Baton Rouge instead of California. I will keep the door open on the website to set up mods thru the end of the year, and spend the first few months of 2026 doing final catch up until they are gone. If you are thinking about having one of your WA mics upgraded, I urge you to speak now or forever hold your peace. They will be disappeared from the website on Jan 1 and we will not respond to any inquiries about them. Last call, as they say!
That's it for now, and I look forward to making many more U47's and now soon M49's in the future.
PS: As some people have inquired, yes we will have some kind of black friday sale announcement but it will only apply to the fully handcrafted tube U47's. There isn't enough margin in any of the mods or other things to be able to offer any kind of discount. But for the fully handcrafted tube 47's, we will soon have a $200 off coupon available thru black friday or a little while thereafter.
Chad
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