To be honest, I bought the t.bone GM55 mainly for the look but I ended up keeping it because of its great audio qualities with regard to its low price. It has one major issue though: you have to push the gain/volume to the max if you want to hear something.
Fortunately, every problem has a solution… hopefully. In the case we are interested in there is one that works: the TritonAudio FetHead!
This is a simple preamp (27 dB gain @3 kΩ) that’s feed by the phantom power. If you are fortunate enough to have this feature on your amp or recording interface, you are saved (most of them have it). Plus, it protects your microphone in case you unintentionally hit the phantom button.
Because I use my microphone live (and for recordings) I hesitated a bit with the filter version of the Fethead (which has a 6 dB/octave high pass filter with a corner frequency of 220 Hz) but in the end, I am happy with this one: super quiet! If I really want to dance on the head of a pin, I will simply play with the noise gate on the recordings tracks.
That is really a relief not having to crank the gain or volume all the way up to 10 all the time!
The design is compact and should fit a standard microphone stand but it needed mods to fit my configuration.
Fortunately, this was easily fixed with the universal mount by König & Meyer:
