David Brown's band Brassaville is popular in Russia. Having widely toured and developed many relationships in the region, it made sense to manufacture Soyuz and Tula microphones in Tula, Russia, an industrial engineering hub located about 200 km from Moscow.
CPM: What prompted you to start Tula, and what’s your relationship with Soyuz?
Brown: The idea of the Tula Mic began in a Best Buy in Oakland, California. I was looking at their USB mic offerings and I thought that it must be possible to build something more beautiful and more functional than what was currently available. I envisioned a mic that was easy to use, could fit in your pocket, and had some added features like mobile recording and onboard noise cancelling. As a designer, it was also very important that it look nice and felt high quality when you held it in your hand. The basic idea was to create something that would allow virtually anyone, not just audio professionals, to capture good sound wherever they happened to be.
Tula Microphones offer on-board recording, a cardioid or omnidirectional pick-up pattern, and much more. Mics are available in four different colors.
As is always the case with hardware, it was a wild ride bringing the Tula from concept to prototype to finished product. I was lucky enough to be working with a very skilled mechanical engineer and project manager (Steven Nersesian) and an electronics/firmware engineer (Stefan Burstrom). They had both worked on several projects with the legendary Swedish audio and design company Teenage Engineering and without them, there would have been no way the Tula would have been able to go from concept to completion in less than a year. Add to that fact that the year was 2020 and it’s nothing short of a minor miracle that Tula was born and works as well as it does.
Soyuz has a rather long and interesting story but there’s not really enough time to go into that here. The short version is, my band, Brazzaville, is oddly popular in Russia. I’ve toured there extensively for many years. At some point, I got the idea that it might just be possible to create a new microphone in Russia that could rival the legendary classic mics of the past like the U47, U67, etc. but WITHOUT being a clone. The idea was that the Soviet Union had developed in parallel with the West, technologically speaking, and that they still used tech that was somewhat lost in the West (tubes, manual lathes, etc). So I thought that, drawing on their rich technical tradition, we could create a mic that could live in the same world as the classics. In the end, my theory was proven right. There are many producers and engineers who normally use classic Neumanns, AKG's, and Telefunkens, who have begun using Soyuz mics as they have a similar but unique character.
The word Soyuz means union in Russian. I co-founded the company ten years ago with my partner, Pavel Bazdyrev. Our idea was to combine technology from Russia with design, quality control, and marketing from the West in order to create a mic that was better than either country could produce on their own. We chose the name Soyuz as a way of emphasizing that it was possible for two countries that rarely get along, to come together in the spirit of peace and creativity and produce something that’s better than either could do on their own. In these troubled times, I think this message is more pertinent than ever.
CPM: What differentiates these brands from others in the market?
Brown: There are several things that are unique at Soyuz. I’ll list them one by one:
SOUND
Available in both tube and FET versions, the Soyuz 013 microphones are designed to capture sound with precision while imparting a warm sonic signature.
The way that we arrive at the sound we’re looking for with our mics is always the same. It begins with describing to our engineers what we’re looking for. For example, with the 013 FET, we said that we wanted a FET SDC that uses an internal transformer”. They designed the circuit and chose the capsule then we identified all the variables involved (capsule tension, transformer value, even choice of resistors and capacitors in some cases). Then we had them make several versions. In the case of the 013FET, it was ten versions. Then we went into the studio with a couple of our trusted audio engineer friends and tested the mics on a variety of sources. Then we listened back and choose the most beautiful variant. It was quite obvious. In the case of the 013FET, there were two great options but one had more low end than the other. Using the logic that it’s much easier to cut low frequencies than insert ones that aren’t there, we went with the variant with the more prominent low end.
CAPSULES
It’s easy to make decent capsules. It’s incredibly hard to make exceptional ones. Very few microphone companies make their own and the ones who do use CNC technology. As far as I know, Soyuz is the only company that makes capsules in the “old-fashioned” way. The belief is that even a CNC machine can’t match the abilities of a master machinist and a highly accurate manual lathe. If you think this sounds like the Emperor’s New Clothes, I totally understand. But the proof is in the results and there’s no denying the results our guys get.
The lathe that we use is called an IZH 250 and they’re made by Kalashnikov. The company can guarantee +-2 microns of tolerance but not +-1 micron, which is necessary for cutting capsules. Because of this, we had to fly our head machinist from our town (Tula, Russia) to Izhevsk three times so that he could test each new machine that Kalashnikov made. The first two didn’t get the +-1 micron but the third one did. That’s the lathe we cut all of our capsules on and it’s not used for anything else.
TRANSFORMERS
As you well know, a transformer can play a critical role in the sound of a microphone. We wind all of our transformers ourselves using cores that are sourced from a company in the Ural Mountains that was founded by a group of five high-level scientists after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
BUILT IN-HOUSE
We believe that the best way to control the quality of our products is to keep as many of the processes in-house as possible. Over the years we’ve been able to move almost all of them into our own factory. Everything from capsules and transformers to metalwork and painting to assembly and testing and even our oak boxes are made by our own team.
LOCATION
Our factory is located in Tula about two hours south of Moscow. As one of the centers of Russia’s military-industrial complex, Tula has a huge reservoir of highly skilled machinists, radio electronics specialists, etc. But the salaries are relatively low compared to Moscow and even more so, the West. We pay our employees 30% above the local average and are still able to pack far more value into our microphones than our competitors in the West can. This means when you buy a 017 Tube for $4600 your really getting a mic that’s worth closer to $10 or $12k.
We don’t hide the fact that our factory is located in Tula. We think that it’s good for people to know that we employ many people who used to use their skills to make weapons and now use them to make microphones. Swords into plowshares!
As far as Tula is concerned, there are several things that distinguish it from other brands in the market:
SOUND
As with our Soyuz mics, we used a similar approach to arriving at the sound of the Tula Mic. Of course, the variables were completely different. The two we settled on were the op amp and the EQ curve within the codec. We used a Burr Brown op amp as it has a very low noise floor and a quite “musical” sound.
Then we recorded a vocal on the Tula and the same vocal on a Soyuz 017 Tube, our flagship Soyuz LDC. We compared the EQ curves of both and drew a curve in the Tula’s codec to resemble the 017 Tube as closely as possible. Of course, a Tula will never sound like a 017 Tube but it helped us to zero in on the “Soyuz Sound” for the Tula Mic.
FEATURES
The Tula is both a plug-and-play USB mic for use with computers, phones, and tablets as well as a mobile recorder with its own internal battery and 8 GB of memory for up to 12 hours of recording capacity. It has a unique noise reduction algorithm called Brusfri which was developed by a Swedish software company called Klevgrand allowing people to achieve great results with VO and podcast recordings in less than perfect acoustic environments.
DESIGN
The Tula has a very simple and elegant design. It’s an exact Golden Ratio (1x1.618) and fits easily in a pocket or purse. All of the function keys are located on the silicone sides of the mic.
PHILOSOPHY
At Tula, we believe in win/win/win. We always try to make our decisions based on what’s best for customers, employees, and investors. We believe in the Right to Repair movement and designed the Tula to be entirely snapped and screwed together for easy repair and end-of-life recycling.
CPM: What do Tula and Soyuz offer for church techs etc?
Brown: Both Soyuz and Tula are run very much like families. This extends to our customers. When people have an issue, they’ll hear from Scotty or Kenny or sometimes even me. They won’t be speaking to some anonymous person at a service center. We strive to make products that add real value to people’s lives and help them to achieve their creative vision, whether that’s recording an album or a podcast or making a live performance sound incredible.
