The Shure SM7B After Eight Years of Daily Use

"Correctly" means close. Very close. Four to six inches from the grille, slightly off-axis to reduce plosives. The proximity effect adds low-end warmth at this distance. Move back to twelve inches and the sound thins out noticeably. This is a close-miking tool. Using it as a room mic is technically possible and practically pointless.

I did open the mic once, in 2021, to clean accumulated dust from the grille. The capsule assembly inside is surprisingly simple: the diaphragm, voice coil, and magnet structure sit in a shock-mounted housing. There's not much to go wrong. No tubes, no transformers in the signal path, no active electronics. The passive design is the reliability.

A colleague of mine runs an SM7B that belonged to a radio station in Detroit. The station bought it in 1985. Forty years of broadcast use, four or five hours of airtime daily, and it's still in rotation at his studio. He paid $75 for it at an estate sale. The serial number dates it to the original SM7 production run before the "B" revision.

The SM7B needs 60+ dB of clean gain for typical voice recording. The Scarlett 2i2's preamp maxes out at 56 dB. This is where the FetHead earns its place in my signal chain.

The FetHead is a small inline device that provides roughly 27 dB of clean gain using phantom power from the interface. It costs about $80. With it engaged, the Scarlett's gain knob sits at the 12 o'clock position for comfortable recording levels. Without it, the knob is cranked to maximum and I'm still hitting -18 dBFS on average speech.

Alternatives exist. The Cloudlifter CL-1 does the same job for $150. The Klark Teknik CT1 is $50 and reportedly works fine, though I haven't tested one personally. The Triton FetHead has been in my chain for six years without issues.

The high-end solution is a better preamp. A Grace M101 or similar boutique preamp has 70+ dB of gain and far cleaner performance than any interface preamp. The cost is $800-1000. For my purposes, the FetHead into the Scarlett delivers results that I cannot distinguish from cleaner signal chains in blind tests of my own recordings. Your mileage may vary. Preamp quality arguments generate more heat than light in audio forums.

I've recorded the same voice (mine) through an SM7B, a Neumann U87, and an Electrovoice RE20 on the same day with the same signal chain. The SM7B sat between the other two in brightness—warmer than the U87, slightly more present than the RE20. All three needed different EQ to achieve the same tonal target. Starting points vary. Final results converge.

The U87 recording had more "air" and top-end detail. It also had more room noise, breath sounds, and mouth clicks. The SM7B recording needed less cleanup in post-production. Time is money. I kept using the SM7B.

Weight: 765 grams without the windscreen. Heavy for a microphone, but the weight contributes to stability on a boom arm. Cheap lightweight mics tend to drift and sag over time. The SM7B stays where I put it.

The yoke bracket is all-metal construction. The adjustment mechanism uses a clutch system that holds position under the mic's weight without needing to be cranked tight. After eight years the clutch still works. This seems like a minor detail until you've used mics with plastic yokes that crack or strip.

The XLR connector on the rear is recessed into the body. The cable exits at a slight angle. This design reduces strain on the cable and prevents accidental disconnection from side impacts. It also makes the mic slightly longer than competitors.

How long does a dynamic microphone last?

The honest answer is that I don't know the upper limit. The SM58 has been in production since 1966. SM58 units from the 1970s still function. The core technology—a moving coil attached to a diaphragm, suspended in a magnetic field—has no consumable parts under normal use. There's no tube to replace, no capacitor to age, no phantom power circuit to fail.

Environmental factors matter. Humidity can cause corrosion over decades. Extreme temperature swings stress materials. Physical impacts can damage the voice coil or diaphragm. But under reasonable indoor conditions with normal handling, the failure rate seems to be measured in decades rather than years.

I'm not an SM7B evangelist. It's a tool that works for my application. Other tools work for other applications. The RE20 has better plosive rejection. The MD421 has more versatility on instruments. Various large-diaphragm dynamics from Rode and Audio-Technica offer similar performance at lower prices. I haven't tested them extensively because the SM7B does what I need.