The AEA KU5A is an active ribbon microphone of the upper class and especially designed for the requirements of vocal recordings and live applications. The KU5A also stands for the typically warm and pleasantly full, round ribbon sound known from AEA, which gives voices and instruments a particularly noble character and at the same time effectively softens sharpness in the treble range. Thanks to its active, transformer-coupled output electronics, the KU5A can be operated at any microphone input and does not require a special preamplifier with large gain reserves. A switchable high-pass filter with 6dB/octave at 283Hz is available to compensate for proximity effect. Like most active models, the microphone is powered via 48V phantom power.