The Manufacturer of Iconic Microphones, Shure Turns 100

Its innovative pro-audio products have had an impact on broadcast for much of that century

Microphones are transducers: electronic devices that convert energy from one form to another — in this case, moving air into electrical impulses (and back again, see: loudspeakers). But microphones can also be icons and symbols: for example, the microphone emoji on Apple’s iOS. Some are Easter eggs for the cognoscenti: long out of production, the Neumann U47 or AKG C12, for instance, are vintage gems that can make audio engineers swoon at their very mention.

The 55SH mic is emblematic of a culture and of its manufacturer Shure.

And then there are mics that are emblematic of entire cultural moments and, rarer still, the one that made it onto a U.S. postage stamp being lovingly caressed by none other than the King, Elvis Presley. Just like Elvis, the Shure 55SH stands alone. The audio equivalent of the chrome bumper on a ’57 Chevy, Shure’s 55 is the trope for an era, a genre, and the company that manufactured it, which is celebrating its 100th birthday this year.

In the Beginning

Founder Sidney N. Shure started the company in downtown Chicago in 1925, not far from its current headquarters in suburban Niles, IL, selling radio-parts kits. In 1932, it introduced its first microphone product, the Model 33N. Since then, the company has developed and delivered a huge array of wired and wireless microphones, conferencing and meeting solutions, and personal and professional listening products, but pro audio, including broadcast, has been its playground.

The SM58 came along in 1966 and is still found in the lead-vocal positions on concert stages globally. Along with the SM57 — apocryphally famous among stage crews for being able to hammer nails before being placed on a snare drum — the pair became Shure’s own version of a Strat and Telecaster combo. Another mile marker was the Vagabond 88, the first handheld wireless microphone, which in 1953 revolutionized the way performers and presenters could use a stage. Over its 100-year history, Shure developed and marketed more than 50,000 electronics products, but microphones were ever its flagship product, led by the formidable 55, widely regarded as the longest-manufactured pro-audio product in history.

More recently, Shure’s Axient line helped redefine wireless-microphone technology. Appearing initially in an analog format, Axient Digital wireless debuted in 2016 and introduced such innovative features as interference detection and avoidance, quadversity, and advanced connectivity options.

Driven by the Depression

Founded as The Shure Radio Company and renamed Shure Brothers Company three years later, the firm was selling radio-parts kits in an era before factory-built radio sets were widely available. In fact, the burgeoning market for ready-made radios as the Great Depression deepened and changed the media landscape compelled Shure to look at microphones.

In a century, Shure has gone from a seller of radio kits to a worldwide supplier of microphones.

In 1931, Sidney Shure and engineer Ralph Glover began development of the first Shure microphone, and, the following year, the Model 33N two-button carbon microphone was introduced, making Shure one of only four microphone manufacturers in the U.S. Shure’s first condenser microphone, crystal microphone, and microphone suspension-support system (for which the company received its first patent) were all introduced that decade. Broadcast applications became a main focus in subsequent decades. For instance, in 1968, the M67 portable mixer, designed for remote-broadcast applications, enabled media journalists to cover stories live in the field.

Sound for Sports

Shure covers several pro-audio verticals, including commercial and corporate. However, one of its main product series in the latter area, the MXA, has been reimagined for broadcast sports, underscoring the company’s tech flexibility. Three years ago, longtime TNT Sports audio guru Dave Grundtvig applied the MXA710 — a four-lobe, remotely steerable, linear microphone array — to NBA games for the first time to more granularly pick up the audio action beneath the hoops. Last year, he did the same with the MXA910, a planar array with more lobes and a wider pickup range, covering more of the goal area. As with the 710 model, he uses Shure’s Intellimix software, which enables the output to be grouped into separate lobes and controlled remotely. Grundtvig places a pair of the units on the basket stanchion, allowing pickup of sounds around the goal and covering more than a fifth of a 94- x 50-ft. NBA court.

“Using the MXA Series products like this gives us a bunch of benefits,” he says. “It gives the sound department and A1 a lot more creativity and flexibility, because you can now capture more audio with less hardware, and you can steer it remotely and on the fly. Also, if the flow of the event changes mid game, we can adapt to that by re-steering the lobes toward the new action. And their networkable aspect means we can share those resources over a single network connection, which thus requires less infrastructure and fewer personnel onsite. Finally, we can mix the lobes individually and manually, or we can let the software auto-mix it in the device.”

Grundtvig recalls his initial experience with the Shure series, an earlier-model MXA310 that he deployed as an experiment at a PGA championship several years ago. To capture a wide range of ambient sound over the course but to get above the thrum of the crowd noise, he attached it to several helium balloons. Conceptually, it worked; however, when a golf cart tangled with one of the stay lines keeping the balloons and the device from floating away, event safety nixed its use. But, he says, “that was our proof of concept. The idea of a multi-lobe device to capture sound [for sports] worked!”

Since then, he says, Shure has seen the potential value in creating a separate category for the device for sports applications, and he’s working with the company to help develop that.

1925: A Turning Point?

Shure’s centenary is also a pivotal year for the entire category, at least according to the New York Times, which published an article this month marking Feb. 25, 1925, as the date the first electrified microphone was used on a recording, at the Columbia Phonograph Company’s studio in Manhattan, describing it as “a newly installed electrical system.”

Pro-audiophiles, a notoriously contentious bunch (including this writer), will happily take issue with that history, noting that the first practical microphone was developed in 1876 by inventor Emile Berliner (who also invented flat-disk records), working in Thomas Edison’s workshop at the time. His carbon-button microphone enclosed two electrical contacts separated by a thin layer of carbon, as documented by numerous sources, including Shure. One contact was attached to a diaphragm that vibrated when struck by a sound wave; the other was connected to an output device, converting sound into voltage. It became the basis for telephone transducers for the next hundred years.

Bell Labs invented the condenser microphone in 1916, improving microphone sound quality via heightened frequency response and sensitivity. The evolution of electrified microphones allowed the audio industry to shift from acoustical recordings, in which a vocalist’s sheer force of volume energized the stylus of a recording-transcription system, to an amplified-analog one, and Edwardian-era sports announcers and Rudy Vallee could finally put down their megaphones.

Today, Shure operates from five global engineering centers dedicated to product and software development: Niles, IL; Copenhagen, Denmark; Suzhou, China; Edinburgh, Scotland; and Hyderabad, India. To commemorate its milestone, the company is launching a series of special activities and products throughout its centenary year.