Say „Soyuz" and you think of a story that sounds like it's straight out of a film — microphones built on lathes from the Kalashnikov factory, by people who used to manufacture weapons. The company was founded in 2013 in Tula, two hours south of Moscow, by American musician David Arthur Brown (lead singer of the band Brazzaville) and Russian entrepreneur Pavel Bazdyrev. The name „Soyuz" (Russian „союз" — „union") is a deliberate nod to the Apollo–Soyuz space program: a symbol of two traditions coming together — Russian mechanical precision and Western design and quality control. Rather than clone the classic Neumanns or AKGs, the founders set themselves a bigger goal: design a brand-new tube microphone from scratch, using manufacturing techniques the West had long abandoned — hand machining on manual lathes.
The factory, known as „The Base", employs former engineers and machinists from Oktava, Russia's oldest microphone factory, operating in Tula since 1927. Capsules are hand-cut on IZH 250 lathes sourced from the Kalashnikov factory in Izhevsk and custom-modified to a ±1-micron tolerance — the precision required to tune a condenser diaphragm properly. The distinctive, „bottle"-shaped body of the flagship SU-017 was designed to echo the golden domes of Orthodox churches, the Sputnik satellite, and the body of a Soyuz rocket. The mic first landed in the hands of engineer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Beck), and its sound can be heard on recordings by Coldplay (including „Everglow"), Metallica, and The Lumineers, among others.
At Wired Tunes we carry the full Soyuz microphone lineup — from the flagship tube SU-017, to the FET version of the same model, to the versatile 023 Bomblet, built around a capsule design based on the vintage Soviet LOMO 19A19. It's the choice for vocalists and engineers chasing warm, classic sound that isn't a copy of anything — a genuinely new, modern classic.
Soyuz Microphones
