Shure SM 7 B

We had a complete studio rebuild over the last lockdown Christmas (in the UK) and I specified the SM7B as a solution to our less that acoustically silent studios. We're based in a very large community centre albeit on the very end of the building but have occasional 'background' noise from within the building (dance studios) and large windows in the room with some residential traffic noise from outside. It's not as bad as it sounds but any large diaphragm condenser would be ingesting this noise like a sponge so we had to look at a practical solution. Given the SM7B is large diaphragm dynamic we benefit from all of the goodness of close proximity voice work with a workable rolloff to be able to gate the extraneous noise from being picked up. Add some compression to the captured audio and the resulting broadcast VLs are solid and perfectly audible without hearing the unwanted noise in broadcast. We can't avoid some unwanted noise behind an open link but the SnR ratio in this respect is more than acceptable. We even managed to avoid having yards of acoustic dampening and designed some very aesthetic frames with four sponge pieces to hang nearby to quash odd reflection. The SM7B solves so many issues just by taking it out of the box you can see why Bruce Swedien loved it so much.

This mic is often adopted by the 'podders mainly for its looks and they love having it pride of place which is fair but despite it needing a kick of gain one should listen very carefully to the results and spend some time tuning it to find the sweet spot for your environment. I honestly think once you've found that spot you could put any talent you can find in front of this mic and they'd sound perfect. As an experiment I've done my setting up and capped off all of the EQ and gains controls on the desk. Our diverse range of presenters in the week are known fiddlers but now they all sound superb with nothing more than a fader to open and close the channel. EQ/processing settings? Desk is an Alice Series A, 100Hz rolloff, a -2dB cut at 4kHz and about 1.5dB boost at 10kHz, flat otherwise. Compression is inserted pre-fade at 3:1 soft knee from -18dB upwards (Berry MDX4600).

Less is always more and confidence speaks volumes if you believe in what you're doing. Ears are the best measuring tool and our listeners are a discerning bunch!