Warm Audio WA-44

With a boutique-quality build and design, the WA-44 is manufactured with exacting quality standards to match the most prized original 1930s-era RCA 44BX vintage mics. The WA-44 ribbon is 99.1% aluminum, true-to-length, 2.5 microns-thick, and custom-crafted in Japan. Paired with the ribbon is a heavy, true-to-size Neodymium magnet designed to create a strong magnetic field capable of delivering nuances and detail in the midrange. The ribbon and magnet are powered by a USA-made CineMag transformer built to reproduce true-to-vintage tone with added modern reliability. Weighing in at over six pounds, the WA-44 revives this classic design with a premium build of intricate and rugged metal work that is ready for every day studio use and abuse. The WA-44 Includes an attached Star-Quad shielded Gotham XLR cable connector, embroidered protective mic sock, and molded case. Add in that all WA-44s are carefully hand-inspected & tested at Warm Audio Headquarters in Austin, Texas and what remains is truly an unprecedented value for a premium ribbon microphone.

True to the vintage original, the WA-44 has an instantly recognizable sound profile, capturing powerful bass, rich midrange, and never-harsh highs with enhanced proximity effect. The WA-44 shows off its warm forgiving tone by taming top-end harshness for smooth lead tones on vocals, horns, drums, pianos, strings and more. Like its inspiration, the WA-44 excels when the goal is to capture intricate low and midrange detail on loud audio sources. The tight figure-8 polar pattern creates opportunities in the studio to capture unique tones that work perfectly in the mix by rejecting side-address noise and reproducing reflections from the back of the mic. A great choice for vocal or instrument recordings that benefit from a reduction in high-end frequencies, the WA-44 is ideal for capturing haunting horn sections, resonant acoustic instruments, sultry strings, flat drum sounds, deep piano tones, and much more.

Like all vintage 44-style passive ribbon mics, the WA-44 needs a sufficient amount of gain to bring out the full frequency spectrum of tone and sonic characteristics of the mic. While the best choice is to use a premium, discrete all-analog mic preamp like the WA-MPX, WA73 series, or WA12 series of preamps, a great alternative is using Warm Audio’s active inline preamp, the Warm Lifter, to add 26dB of clean analog gain between the mic and any XLR preamp input. Gain on audio interfaces is frequently underpowered. Even when 65+ dB of gain is advertised, the resulting tone often sounds thin and introduces unwanted noise and sonic artifacts. Warm Lifter puts a high-impedance mic pre with pure analog gain, tone filtering, and balanced JFET input at your fingertips at an incredible size and price.