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.