Sanken MS-2

The Sanken MS-2 is a Japanese omnidirectional large diaphragm dynamic microphone.

The Sanken MS-2 is a Japanese omnidirectional large diaphragm dynamic microphone. I am unclear on the date of manufacture, but based on its styling, it looks like it’s probably from the 50’s or 60’s. If you’re familiar with some of the modern Sanken microphones, you know that they are some of the finest microphones manufactured known for their amazing build quality and detailed, transparent, and musical sound reproduction. Despite being a 60+ year old dynamic mic, the MS-2 is surprisingly useful on a wide variety of sources. When we got these mics, we were at most expecting a fun and useable lo-fi microphone, but were completely surprised to discover that the MS-2 has a relatively wide and balanced frequency response with just the right amount of “lo-fi” flavor that works especially well as a room mic for drums, and is equally suited for guitar amps, bass amps, or as kit mics.

The build quality is really top notch, the connector and swivel mechanism is especially well-made. It’s a simple design with a large dynamic capsule feeding an output transformer.

Manufacturer	Sanken
Model	MS-2
Country of Origin	Japan
Year	1950's/1960's
Microphone Type	Dynamic
Polar Pattern	Omnidirectional

Listen

You can hear this mic in action by listening to our "proprietary microphone jingle" from the audio player below. The entire song was recorded using the MS-2 for every instrument. The pair was used on drums with one positioned about 3 ft above the snare, and one positioned in front of the kick, raised about 6” above the top of it, pointed at the snare. We then used a single one for each amp and vocal. Everything was recorded at modest levels through our Sphere Eclipse console preamps into a Burl A/D without any processing whatsoever..