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KC: In your time, what are some of the most significant products and or technologies that have come out of Shure?
Michael: Well, you have to start with Unidyne, even though it was well before I arrived, because a large percentage of our business is still built on that concept.
Since I’ve been here, the V15-IV and V15-V phono cartridges, which included a dynamic stablizer, have been quite significant. The stablizer - what most people think is just a brush – actually does three important things. Yes, as you might expect, it cleans the record, but it also destaticizes the record, which was a new concept at the time. Most importantly, it acts like a shock absorber, allowing warped records to track perfectly. That was a major development in the phono market, and still is to this day.
In circuitry products or mixers, two come to mind, starting with the DFR11EQ equalizer with digital feedback reducer. There are other ones on the market, but I think for speech applications ours works the best. I’m looking at this from an engineering standpoint and not marketing/sales.
We also made a big impact and helped establish the concept of automatic mixing, the idea of voice-activated microphones for speech applications. Shure first introduced a version of this in 1983 – it was called the Automatic Microphone System (AMS) – and it was unique. The company still holds a patent on it, because it had double-element microphones working with a special mixer that activated only when a talker was seated within a certain angle. It was the first automatic mixer that activated microphones based on the direction of the talker’s signal.
Auto mixers had already been around for maybe eight to nine years before ours came out, but the AMS really helped establish automatic mixing as commonplace for city councils, boardrooms, any type of legislative situation. Of course, this is still the biggest portion of the auto mixer market now.
Also with mixers - and I’m a little prejudiced because it’s my area - we brought out the FP line of mixers. When Sony Betacam came out in the ‘80s, the one-piece recorder camera adopted quickly for broadcast news, there was no portable audio mixer to go with it. So we developed the FP line - the FP31 was the first (3 in, 1 out) - that would run off batteries and you could hang it around your neck. Now you see this all the time with ENG crews, but back in the ‘80s there was no such thing. They either weren’t using an audio mixer or had something large and unwieldy.
The wireless microphone market, which we took our time getting into as it now stands, was actually addressed way back in 1953 with a Shure system called the Vagabond. It was used mostly in Las Vegas for a lot for live shows, but it was quite expensive, costing something like $9,000 in today’s dollars. For various reasons, but mostly because it used vacuum tubes and was relatively fragile, this system didn’t work as well as the company wanted, so we got out of that market, returning in the late ‘80s.
When you look at microphones from a strictly engineering standpoint, most of the crucial concepts have been around since the ‘20s and ‘30s. There have been no really new and revolutionary developments since then. The idea of microphones on integrated circuit chips may eventually cause a change, but these are still too noisy, and so on, to be used for professional applications.
In-ear monitoring was certainly a technology in its infancy, and Shure was the first major manufacturer to bring it down to a price-point where the average person could afford it. Again, this goes to the idea of technology that’s very rugged and reliable at a reasonable price-point. This kind of permeates all of these recent products I’ve been talking about.
KC: Tell me about a product or two that you thought was going to be huge, but for some reason, have been overlooked.
Michael: The SM89 shotgun comes to mind. One of the main complaints about shotgun mics among those who use them - primarily filmmakers and documentary makers - is the off-axis coloration that tends to happen. Anything off-axis tends to sound strange and not natural.
We did a lot of research into this, and found that resonances were being created in the long shotgun tube. One of our engineers found a very interesting material in the medical industry, a porous plastic, and he discovered that by putting this in the tube, it cleaned up a lot of these resonances. As a result, the SM89 is, by far to my ear, the best-sounding shotgun mike out there, particularly in terms of off-axis coloration. But it didn’t seem to catch everyone’s fancy – I think the market is relatively small for shotgun mics anyway, and there’s a lot of folks who just won’t change no matter what.
But it was interesting to take a material from a totally different industry and use it to enhance something in audio. Just because the world didn’t beat a path to our door to get it doesn’t mean it’s not a good product.
Home theater. Shure was actually in this market early, before it had matured. We actually had a home theater surround sound division in the mid-‘80s – a complete line of loudspeakers, power amplifiers, everything – but it was just too early, probably by about five to six years. So we got out of this market because it wasn’t profitable. Like a lot of people at that time, I couldn’t see the logic in rearranging my living room for home theater, but we became the minority at some point, so in hindsight it’s a market that maybe we should have stayed in.
The other thing is that we were probably the first company making high-quality speakerphones and teleconference equipment. Shure had a teleconferencing division from the early ‘80s to the early ‘90s that did quite well. What got us out of that business was U.S. Robotics, which brought out teleconferencing equipment that worked very poorly but sold at about a third of the price of ours, and then customers wanted to know why we couldn’t match the price.
Interestingly enough, after that happened and we phased out the division, U.S. Robotics figured out they also couldn’t make any money in the market and they pulled out, and this pretty much left the market to PolyCom. At a certain point in time, there were people in the business world who only knew us by our teleconferencing products.
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