Allow me to Introduce the FC-387 Atlantis from Lauten Audio

The idea of the FC-387 Atlantis was conceived over several years during conversations between me, Brian Loudenslager, founder of Lauten Audio and Fabrice DuPont of Flux Studios and Puremix.net. Fab had acquired several Lauten microphones over the years and I would always pull Fab aside to pick his brain at industry tradeshows.

I always try and speak to owners of our products to learn where they’re using a microphone most, where they feel it’s shining and where it’s not working for them. Every microphone designer knows there is not one microphone that will sound best on every application. What I loved most about Fab is he was always brutally honest and never sugar coated anything. Whether Fab knew it or not, it was during these conversations that I made a challenge to myself; I wanted to design a microphone that Fab would love, one that would be part of his first choices at the beginning of a session.

The general idea of how to make the microphone e.g. components etc. came to me out of left field one day when I was not working. It was one of those; that’s it, Bam! moments. So, in January 2011 I started to build rough prototypes and run them through some of our tests. Rather quickly and by then end of February I had something I thought sounded great and looked interesting during frequency response analysis. I assembled a studio testable prototype and sent an email to Fab saying "I have something I want you to test". He responded the next day saying “send it; we’ll put it through its paces.”

A week later Fab responded with “I like the direction very, very much. It's a GREAT mic. Definitely like no other modern mic I've heard. The bottom is very fat but not muddy. Could you model the top a little to get closer to an Oceanus or is that just not possible?“

This response led to a deeper conversation and where to take this new microphone. I took Fab's ideas to our engineers to evaluate how to make them a reality. Within a short time Fab and I agreed on the theoretical timbre and functionality the microphone would have.

A few more tweaks and I sent Fab another version. I didn’t hear back for a bit, and I feared I didn’t meet the expectations and had lost Fab’s interest. However, during a conversation with Simon Cote, at Audio Plus Services, Simon said, have you heard from Fab? I said, no unfortunately not, he said, he loves the version 2 microphone and can’t believe you were actually able to translate what he told you into reality.

Now we had, in prototype form, found the sweet spot of our new microphone design; well, one sweet spot, we now wanted 3 sweet spots via a switch. This was a whole other challenge in itself. In the end we found those sweet spots and the FC-387 Atlantis was born. The Atlantis name actually came from Fab while brainstorming during dinner in NY.

I am very excited about the FC-387 Atlantis and it has been a pleasure working with Fab and his team. This microphone not only has a very sweet sound, but it’s also perhaps one of the most versatile in the Lauten Audio line up.

If you are attending the 2012 Winter NAMM show, I invite you to stop by booth 6998 to see and learn more about the Atlantis.

Sincerely,

Brian Loudenslager

Founder

Lauten Audio