Has the SM57 lost Presidential approval?

[paulears]

For years now, all the images we see in the UK of the American president and other senior figures featured a pair of Shure SM57s on the lectern. I now see all sorts of strange microphones - so what has happened? Have Shure fallen out with the new administration?

 

[rmburrow]

I can't even tell what is being used now... I guess the Signal Corps still handles a lot of that Presidential stuff...the inaugural mics were buried in foam windscreens... seems to be the case now where windscreens hide everything someone could recognize....

 

[dvdhawk]

Although they've been the standard for decades, they are 'bad hombres'.

 

[rmburrow]

Who knows....it's hard to "kill" a SM57 and especially a SM58....
Those are built as rugged as the old EV635A...I saw one 40 years ago where there was a fight in a radio station production studio and someone got hit over the head with a 635, dented the case, and it still worked.... lol
Wonder why the Signal Corps switched....

 

[DonnyThompson]

Who knows....it's hard to "kill" a SM57 and especially a SM58....

Yup. And they are lawnmower proof, too.

 

[pan60]

lawnmower proof, LOL

 

[DonnyThompson]

lawnmower proof, LOL

Yup. Forgot to mention that the mic laid under 5" of ice and snow for 4 months before I hit it with the Toro in the Spring.
It worked for another 24 years after that before it finally lost the will to live and gave up the ghost this past Fall.
I've got it enshrined on a shelf in my studio.

 

[Boswell]

Sounds like you missed selling a marketing opportunity. I can just see the adverts now - a close-up of a 57 being run over by a lawnmower, with the caption "Shure microphones. A cut above the average"

 

[dvdhawk]

I've got an SM58 that the lead singer lost in Nov. and it turned up in the mud in April (after the snow melted, but before anybody broke out their lawnmowers). That was around 1991-92. I still have it and it still works fine, although the steel mesh windscreen eventually got a little rusty and was replaced.

If I find one that doesn't work in my travels, it's almost always because people can't leave things alone. They unscrew the mid-section of the body and break one (or both) of the wires from the capsule to the transformer. I find some that have been dropped so many times the windscreen is almost box-shaped, but the mic will work fine if they haven't gone out of their way to break it.