Sennheiser MD46 fake or not?

J

J.Brown

Well-known member
I just purchased a used Sennheiser MD46 and just want to make sure it's a genuine product. It looks nice but how can I tell it's the real deal?

So I'm calling out other owners of the MD46. First I took a look at the spec and it's supposed to weight 360grams. Mine weights 364grams so how much do your MD46 weight? All text looks fine and fit and finish is perfect as far as I can see. Are there any tell signs to point towards real or not?
 
I've had experience of many fake Shure and Sennheiser products, and the one thing that doesn't work is weight. Sure Sm57s over the years have varied in weight for design reasons - as in different transformers and capsule materials, so the critical thing with some copies is a HUGE variation in weight - one that is obvious when you pick them up. Really light alloy. There are probably as many fakes in Sennheiser 835 and 845 designs as the 57s. One thing is that I have never seen any fake 845s fitted with anything other than the normal 835 cardioid capsule.

The 46 is not a commonly faked mic at all. I get offered fakes by my suppliers every week, but they always have the standard handle length. 46 is not in demand to make a new casting worthwhile. However - with all the Senheisers, the common giveaway is handling noise. holding a genuine Sennheiser and tapping your first finger lightly on the case results in very little handling noise. The fakes have very lively outsides. Fingers make a lot of noise.

If you buy brand new mics from China, they will now rarely say Sennheiser or Shure any more. Brand names have become a killer with our UK Border Force, and presumably with the US version too. Sennheiser or shore labels from China get spotted and seized. They still sell the mics as 57s or 835s, have the same box and contents, but the basket is unprinted now. Of course this doesn't apply to older ones.

Fake in one hand, genuine in the other is an easy one. Speak through them and differences are obvious. If you only have one - then put your doubts to one side for a moment. Plug it in and use it. What does it sound like? If it sound fine, does the job, and doesn't have terrible handling noise, then treat it as genuine and move on. If it sounds rubbish you have your answer. if you got it for a good price, it isn't terribly battered and sounds good - it IS good.

I'd be very surprised if you have a MD46 that isn't genuine - just not a volume product for the scammers.

Oddly, for me counterfeit products don't worry me too much until they spoil things. Going to a festival where we discovered all the Shure SM58s they had bought were fakes, and we swapped them for our own and the sound difference explained all the feedback issues they'd had for two days. They didn't realise what the problem was until they heard our old, but good ones.

I've kept the counterfeits I've accidentally collected over the years. A Shure 87 that works without phantom power, a couple of 845s that do great service as talkback mics and one terrible 58 that I put a pyro in to make it go bang on stage with a puff of smoke.

one question. What does it sound like? That's really it from the ownership perspective. Ethically, it's a dodgy and wicked process if it deceives people, but if you just want wreckable mics, or loaners to untrustworthy people (we all know them) why give them a genuine Shure when you can give them the rubbish 58 you bought by accident/design.
 
Thanks for sharing your experience. I went to my Korg PA1000 and compared the MD46 to my SM58 and the MD46 actually sounds much better than the SM58. I know my SM58 is the real deal and it sounds good by itself but not as good as the MD46. Not that the MD46 is a singers microphone by design but my voice sounded better than ever. There's actually nothing suspect about the MD46 I got it's just I started to read about fake Sennheiser products so I wanted to be sure.
 
That is enough to convince me it's fine. I actually don't mind the sound of 835 and 845 Sennheiser capsules against the 58. The hyper is not that narrower, so quite useful, and I think that's the capsule Senheisser fit in the 46.
 
Man - I own a Sennheiser AVX-MKE2 lav SET that I bought from B&H - love it. 900 plus tax - not cheap - bought one on ebay a couple of months back. The guy said it was brand new - never used - etc. I read about counterfeits on the AVX - came across nothing. So I pull the trigger. 560 bucks. Oh - the guy bought it directly from amazon - not a third party seller. End of story - the thing was a fake - luckily I got my money back from ebay. How did I know it was a fake = well the sound difference was a big one - handling of noise a nightmare - but then when you started to really look at the lettering on things, that kind of detail, everything was just ever so slightly off - from the material used, connections not as tight, etc. anyway - its late - my brain is asleep - but they did a damn good job on it let me tell ya. BEWARE - buy only from named stores - as we all know :)
 
Wow, I never knew that there was such an issue with counterfeits. I thought OP was paranoid until I read the rest of the posts. As a paranoid dude in general, this is going to cause me to worry about my mics for the rest of my career. Thanks, I guess!
 
What's happening is that China now has seriously cut the number of easily available products with Shure and Sennheiser brand names on them. Five years ago, you could simply buy a Shure SM58 or Sennheiser EW100 or 300 series radio mic from China and while they looked like the real ones they weren't. Now, the things are still there but the brand names are now missing. A big hit was made on guitars. fender, Gibson, Prs, rickenbacker and others all now cut by a very large percentage. As China is the source of many genuine products, electronics in particular, some of these were actually good, but microphones were quite obvious when you hear them and feel them and the guitars were very variable. Some beautifully finished and play well and other simply awful. Some of the radio systems are good, others bad. Like the Sennheiser look alike IEMs. They had dual inputs lee and right, the receivers had stereo sockets for the headphones but the systems were stone cold mono! The Sennheiser ew receivers however, perform really well and if you mix them with real ones, you cannot tell the difference. If you know the fine detail you can, but it's silly things like non functioning network facilities and mounting holes not M3 tapped, just a hole. The Chinese do some amazing value headsets for radio systems that can simply be scrapped when they get broken. Got a show coming up with children or teenagers? DPAs are easily wrecked, so hire them out with cheap headsets rather than mega expensive ones. Now, you can buy, with care, Chinese kit without branding at the cheap and expensive ends of the spectrum. Mind you, never buy Shure or Sennheiser on eBay. Shure dealers are not allowed to sell on that platform for reputation reasons. The latest trick is to list counterfeits as used. Used once, or unsold stock, or demo stock, that kind of thing. They take the forged guarantee card out and you think you got a great deal, but you didn't. With a genuine one to compare with, you can spot them with just a five second sound check.
 
A few years ago, there was a wave of fake Sennheiser e945 mics, and working from memory, those look a lot like the MD46... So maybe?

A couple years ago, Pete Verrando, a good Texas-based mixer, knowingly bought a fake 416 and compared it to a real 416. Interesting reading:

An unhealthy obsession with fake Sennheiser MKH416 microphones
http://txsound.com/blog/obsession-with-fake-sennheiser-mkh416-microphones/

And from a couple months ago, check out all the mics in photo (foreground and background). Yow!

Hundreds of fake Shure, Sennheiser, Yamaha and Harman products seized in factory raid
https://www.musicradar.com/news/hun...ha-and-harman-products-seized-in-factory-raid
 
the Chinese are still selling the e945s in quantity for pocket money prices - BUT all they've done is remove the Sennheiser name. They are also shifting Shure mics, again without the Shure name, but with various KSM model numbers very visible.
 
The e’s have a shorter handle/body and are much darker in color, almost black vs. grey on the MD’s. At least the genuine ones, anyway.
 
Ya, but I'd think length and finish wouldn't be that hard to change if you already have the machines to fabricate 945s...

Just depends if the the counterfeiters see a big enough market to bother...
 
I own 3 MKH 416 mics. The first one I bought was used, loved it and wanted to buy more. Then I started hearing about counterfeits which got me really paranoid. I saw a great deal on ebay from a trusted seller that I couldn't pass up on. When I recieved the mic I opened up the capsule and it looked very different than the one I already owned. I was convinced the new one was a counterfeit and contacted the seller insisting that they allow me to return the mic and get my money back. They pushed back so I looked into it some more. I then contacted Sennhieser and they were able to confirm that both my mics were genuine and that the circuitry just looked different over the years. I really made an ass out of myself and felt terrible for accusing the seller of a fake...probably one of the worst things you can do is accuse someone of doing something dishonest. Lesson learned the hard way.
 
Ya, Sennheiser redesigned the 416 in the late 90s, mainly adding more surface-mount stuff (IIRC); don't think they've redesigned it more than once.

But the insides of (at least one line of) fake 416s look really different. Check out the pix on Pete Verrando's site (I link to it above). One of the pix:

Fake 416 on top, real one below:
DSCN1640-1024x768.jpg
 
I just got a Sennheiser e945 and compared that to my MD46 and I know now for sure that my MD46 is the real deal. The capsule looks almost identical to the e945.
 
I got offered a Shure 545 from a Chinese factory, and had never seen a counterfeit of this model before so bought it. The 545 was my very first microphone, which I got in 1974, and the counterfeit is a very, very poor copy. The wrong colour black, and the most awful lightweight material. The aluminium tube is much finer and lighter, the switch totally different, and the grill a different size mesh at the sides. It sounds normal for a cheap dynamic cartridge, but nothing is remotely similar to a Shure 545.
 
J.Brown said:
I just got a Sennheiser e945 and compared that to my MD46 . The capsule looks almost identical to the e945.
Click to expand...
Could very well be the same capsule, but the ports and such could be different. Sennheiser specifies the e945 as a Super-cardioid, OTOH the MD46 is listed as cardioid. I have used an MD46 (interview mic) and the pattern seems wider and more 'forgiving' than a typical 'live performance' type cardioid mic. i.e., Shure SM58 and Sennheiser e835.
I have not read of any MD46 counterfeits. probably because it is not a 'main stream' popular item.
OTOH, SM58 counterfeits and 'clones' are more than abundant.
 
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