The “Sound Card” did not impress. There was an awful lot of noise, and a huge I/O delay, such that it was almost impossible to talk while monitoring with headphones. I’ll probably tear that sound card apart later. It doesn’t even sound very good for playback. For use with “USB sound cards” with fixed and limited gain, the stock mic’s high output is a plus. The modded mic, with lower output, but much higher SPL capability needs a lot of boost in post, since the sound cards only have 23 - 25dB of gain on the mic inputs. All of these sound bites have been normalized to -1dB peak.

Here’s the stock mic with a Cable Creation USB Sound Card:

Quieter, but still suffers from digital noise in the Plug-In-Power. The small capsule is somewhat bass shy, but voice intelligibility is good.

Now the modified mic. Everything but the shell has been replaced. The capsule is a 34mm brass mystery electret from AliExpress. The circuit is a K596 soldered directly to the capsule, driving a pair of PNP outputs in a Schoeps configuration. Here, it was tested to see if it would still work with the Cable Creation sound card on 3V PIP. It does, but gain is low:

And finally, what it sounds like with a proper studio interface with 48V phantom power:

Here are pictures of the mic before, during, and after mods:

Finally, a quick frequency sweep. As guessed from the voice test, it’s warm with a presence rise from 4 to 8K, and little “air”above 10K. Two examples tested are very similar.