Starting an all-new Microphone brand in 2024, just why would we do this, especially in such a competitive and crowded market?

Well, in all honesty all of us here at Aim Audio have been in the pro-audio world and specifically the studio microphone space for (collectively) hundreds of years. No that doesn’t mean we’re all a bunch of “died-in-the-wool” traditionalists, but between us all at Aim genuinely has massive amounts of audio and studio microphone experience, just that we’ve always done this for others.

Collectively, the Aim Audio team really wanted to think “what could we do better”? 

We started having conversations with our team about our brand in 2020.

Many of us have experience as working as musicians, producers and engineers touring live and or recording in world class studios. In addition, we have all worked on the brand side in a varied set of roles. Electronics, design, manufacturing, acoustics, procurement, sales, distribution, marketing and so much more, we’ve been there and worked for so many HUGE and respected companies in the audio world (such as Aston Microphones, Avid, AKG, beyerdynamic, Blue Mics, Sennheiser, Shure, TC Electronic, Yamaha – to name but a few).

Bringing this all together with such a diverse team in so many locations around the world, not to mention during a pandemic (!), has definitely had its challenges, plus without the realms of Zoom/Teams/Skype it would just not have been possible. However, when we started our journey, we took a holistic and yet detailed look at the whole studio microphone category.

Together, we own, use and treasure many vintage mics. We also realise that that not everyone has the luxury to be able to afford or even use many of these classics. On the other hand, our team didn’t just want to make “me too” or “copycat” products that just focus on price or look to fancy marketing gimmicks.

In the process, we found that compared to so many other products in the pro audio and musical world, studio mics are generally what you could call a “low innovation” segment. Therefore, we aspired to disrupt the microphone industry a little, by making better products and returning mass production of microphone manufacturing back to the home of condenser studio mics – Berlin.

One question that kept coming up was “why is it that so many brands seek to either always look to the past in terms of look or try to reinvent the wheel without thinking if those innovations were actually useful?”. A tall order? Yes, but with our initial models to market we believe we have gone quite a ways to achieve that lofty goal – and then some!

At the same time, a lovely new and sleek design is all very well, but not only did the product have to at least be as good as the best mics in our collections and if possible, exceed the competition in terms of audio quality. But we also wanted to look at what things we could add and still keep our products attainable for working musicians, engineers, home recordists etc.

The whole ethos about the Aim Audio brand is whatever innovation we bring to the market must be useful.

Very many hours were spent brainstorming what was possible and what was achievable without making a product cost a million dollars! Some ideas were obvious to us, but we really thought about this from a musician and studio engineer’s perspective, as in what makes the task of recording easier and solving practical problems, so creativity is less likely to be hampered.