Coming from an AKG C3000B, I was looking for a more all-round mic with a honest and balanced sound as possible. I spent some months on comparing mics, Neuman's, replica's, Warm Audio, etc. Every comparision and review this mic stood out to me. It's balanced, well designed and the story behind was cool too (akg fired all their people in the factory in austria and they started this own brand). It's even more hilarious i came from an AKG mic ;-) I don't think there's much better bang for your buck. I also compared them to several AKG 414 and this one won every time. For now i've mostly used it for male vocals and it's pretty straightforward to make it sound good: Apply some EQ dips on the low end,, a double touch of compression (a gentle one, and hard one), then some extra EQ, perhaps a touch of saturation, some de-essing and lastly, sends to reverb or some delay and voila. Have fun