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Long time lurker first time poster (i think), hello! Also, I posted this on gearslutz too, apologies to anyone who read both forums. I recently bought a Sennheiser 418S m/s microphone off eBay, since I’m doing a bunch of field recording projects at the moment but I liked the idea of retaining some possibility for stereo ambiences in my recordings. The 418S was recommended to me by a friend who I work with a lot, and I had been pretty impressed by the recordings he had made with it. It seemed like just what I needed. Anyway, when it arrived I was dismayed to plug it in and hear a pretty serious hiss on the mid channel. I compared it to my cheap ME66 and the comparison made it even more obvious. I even set them up and did a quick and dirty A/B test, which you can hear at this link. The result was the same both in my Sound Devices 552 and my RME Fireface interface. To me the mic is unusable. The eBay seller asked me to send it to his repair guy in Germany, who in turn has told me that he tested it and it does not have any faults. I'm inclined to disagree, but I thought I'd ask around to see what other people thought. So my question is kind of in the description: am I crazy to think that this mic is faulty? I know it's a weird mic, but it would be pretty useful for what I'm doing at the moment. There is so much hiss in it, I can't possibly believe that it's supposed to be that way, even if it's pretty quirky. Any help/tips would be great!