David Royer’s other microphone company.

Mojave Audio is a condenser-microphone company in Los Angeles, and its history is really two histories: that of a name the designer David Royer used on and off for years, and that of the company he set up with a partner in 2005. The company calls itself “family-owned and proudly based in Los Angeles since 2005,” and its website now gives its address as the Third Encore Studios campus in North Hollywood.

Royer is better known for ribbon microphones. English Wikipedia says he designed his first ribbon microphone in 1997 and established Royer Labs, now in Burbank, the following year. Mojave is the condenser side of his work. In a June 2012 interview with Recording Hacks, Royer said his early ribbon microphones “were sold under the Mojave Audio name,” and that before “the official launch of Mojave Audio as we know it now” he had used the name when he was a “lone wolf,” which happened “a few times between 1983 and 1998.” That explains a conflict in the record: Sound On Sound wrote in December 2020 that Mojave was founded “in the 1980s,” while the company dates itself to 2005. Both are, in their way, right.

The company tells its origin as a garage story. Mojave, it says, was “an idea hatched in a Fullerton, California garage,” where Royer built custom microphones for studio engineers and delivered them himself on a Triumph Bonneville motorcycle. It says he trained as a sonar technician in the US Navy, and in the 2012 interview Royer described himself, in his own words, as an “ex-Navy sonar technician.” The name, the company says, is his “homage to the desert he loves.”

The web archive shows the change. In June 2003 mojaveaudio.com described itself as the “Home of David Royer’s do-it-yourself tube microphones and outboard pro-audio equipment.” By mid-2005 the same address was announcing “the new MA-200 Large Diaphragm Condenser Microphone” and inviting visitors to the NAMM show in Anaheim in January 2006.

A producer, a designer and the MA range.

Royer’s partner is Dusty Wakeman, a producer and engineer. The company says he founded Mad Dog Studios in Los Angeles, where he worked on records for Dwight Yoakam, Lucinda Williams and Buck Owens, and that in 2005 he “co-founded Mojave Audio with partner David Royer” and became its president; Sound On Sound quoted “Mojave President Dusty Wakeman” in 2017. Mojave and Royer Labs are separate businesses with different partners: a photo caption in the 2012 Recording Hacks interview showed Royer “pulled in two directions” by Wakeman at Mojave and John Jennings at Royer Labs.

The first product of the new company was the MA-200, a valve microphone with a fixed cardioid pattern that Mojave says was inspired by the Neumann U67. The range grew around it, with every model carrying an “MA” number. The MA-201fet is a solid-state microphone the company calls U87-inspired; the MA-300 adds switchable patterns to the MA-200’s design, and the MA-301fet does the same for the 201. The MA-50, a transformerless design, is its most affordable studio microphone; Sound On Sound reviewed it in December 2020 at $599.

The flagship is the MA-1000, which Sound On Sound reviewed in 2017 at $2,795. The magazine described it as Royer’s version of the Telefunken ELA M 251, with a new-old-stock 5840 valve, a transformer built by Coast Magnetics and a capsule modelled on AKG’s CK12; the company adds that it ships with Royer Labs’ Sling-Shock mount, a reminder of the link between the two firms.

The MA-37 is the most specific homage. Sound On Sound, reviewing it in early 2022 at $3,499, called it Royer’s “modern take” on the Sony C-37A, a single-diaphragm valve microphone that the magazine says was widely used in American studios, and noted that among Western high-end makers only David Josephson had previously tackled that capsule. More recently Mojave has moved onto the stage, with the MA-D, which it calls Royer’s first handheld dynamic microphone, and the MA-C, a handheld condenser.

Design and documentation.

This round turns to six more microphone makers: boutique valve and ribbon designers in California, a British maker on the Dorset coast, and a brand made in Russia.

Four are in California. AEA is in Pasadena and says its microphones are “handcrafted” there. Mojave Audio, which says it was co-founded in 2005 by the producer Dusty Wakeman and the designer David Royer, calls itself “family-owned” and based in Los Angeles. Josephson Engineering says it began in San Jose in 1988, moved to Santa Cruz in 2000, and designs and makes all its products there. Bock Audio, which David Bock says he formed in 2007 after co-founding Soundelux Microphones, designs the valve and FET microphones that Universal Audio has sold since 2022, which UA says it hand-builds at its Santa Cruz custom shop.

Sontronics is in Poole, Dorset, and its website names Omnisonic International Ltd. Soyuz is in Tula, Russia; English Wikipedia, citing Reuters, says it was founded in 2013 by the American singer David Arthur Brown and the Russian entrepreneur Pavel Bazdyrev.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Designed in California, assembled across the Pacific.

We found no claim on Mojave’s website that its microphones are made entirely in the United States, and the record shows why. Sound On Sound reported in December 2020 that the company uses what it calls a “hybrid of domestic and overseas manufacturing,” outsourcing “most of the assembly part of the process to a single company in China” with which it has a long relationship. Royer does the design and sources key parts such as valves and transformers, the magazine said, and “personally signs off each microphone” after quality control at the company’s base, then in Burbank. Reviewing the MA-1000 in 2017, the same magazine said it used a “Chinese-made capsule” and that final assembly was done in Burbank. The company’s own most specific claim is narrower: it says the MA-37’s replica capsule is “handmade in California.”

Recognition attaches mostly to Royer. The Recording Academy lists Royer Labs among its Technical Grammy recipients for 2013, for its reintroduction of the ribbon microphone; Mojave’s product pages describe Royer as a Technical Grammy winner. The company also says it has earned five TEC Award nominations and a win for the MA-37, which we have not checked independently. We found no published brand guidelines, and no record of a sale; the company describes itself as family-owned. Its products are identified by their MA numbers rather than by names.

For a design guide, Mojave Audio shows how a designer’s name and a place name can carry a brand between two companies. Compare Royer Labs, Royer’s ribbon-microphone company in Burbank, and Neumann, whose U67 and U87 Mojave names as inspirations. For this guide we use a night-sky blue, a rust and a desert sand with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Mojave Audio’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.