Electro-Voice - RE20

It's a lot about the philosophy in the mic's design. The RE20 was specifically designed for broadcast announcers/commentators/show hosts. It's built so you really can't get close enough to the actual mic to get a lot of proximity effect and its built-in blast protection is excellent. Wide, flat frequency response makes voices sound very natural even when used very close. Mics like the SM57 and 58 have proximity effect but have built-in low-frequency rolloff, so they work well hand-held and very close to the sound source.

RE20 is great at rejecting background noise and built like a tank… use one for work and music in an untreated room, it’s great

Got both at home and I tend to prefer the RE20. It feels flatter to my heara when I listen back to my recordings.

I used to love the RE20 for everything. Hell, I even influenced its history. But more often than not, I prefer the SM7B.

Test engineer for a gaming peripherals brand here. SM7B, not because it isn't a great mic, but because it has now become the "grail" mic for amateurs who don't know any better. It's just the blind leading the blind. This is more of a streaming/Podcasting thing than the audience here, but I still feel like it's worth mentioning as it's practically become a meme at this point. I'd love to see a bit more variety open up in the space. The RE20 is the obvious choice. I'm sure the combination of the most common color being that ugly grey that doesn't look good on-camera (in a typical streaming setup at least), despite the black version costing the same amount, and the fact that Electro-Voice just isn't as well-known outside of the pro audience as Shure, which makes a good variety of products that lean more towards consumer audio than pro audio.

Yeah, I've seen a lot of posts in /r/microphone about fake TLM103s. I don't imagine that it will replace the SM7B in the gaming space (where I work these days) for most people for the reasons of its significantly higher cost and the fact that most gamers/streamers are in untreated spaces, making it more challenging to get good results from a condenser microphone. When I started my job, it was mostly USB microphones, and as people have been upgrading to XLR, you've seen them gravitate towards dynamic mics, especially in more recent years (since I don't see entry level condensers like the AT2020 as much as I used to). Still, I wouldn't be surprised if you're correct for more of the market that is streaming more music-related content than just gaming. The fact that I'm seeing so many posts about fakes and people asking if they have fakes helps demonstrate that. And yep, you're definitely right about people just copying others being unfortunate. This is especially true with vocal microphones since voices are so personal and varied. They also often don't realize that there are other factors that matter too, like microphone technique, preamps, etc.

Yeah, they're both great! My point was more that it's insane how much more popular the SM7B is in the amateur space. Honestly, due to its minimal proximity effect, I think the RE20 is a better fit for a lot of amateurs who won't really know much or anything about microphone technique. The difference in sound signature really doesn't matter in most of these amateur use cases either.

SM7b, SM57 or RE20 for mics. They are industry standards, multi purpose and you will use them for decades. Buy cheap interface with lots of preamp gain and sell it next year for better one.

I feel like in that price range it’s tough finding a mic that has listeners in awe unless you’re using premium mic pres and have a really well treated room but for your price range I would check out the used marketplace for a soyuz 1973, re20, or some vintage neumann clones. also consider using the soyuz launcher with whatever mic pre you’re using now. I got one recently and tried it with an sm58 on vocals and was surprised how good it actually ended up sounding I have a sm7b and while it’s a good mic the re20 is a way more impressive sounding mic imo in that price range

I'll be that guy. If there are two of you you should both be using dynamic not condenser mics. Is your room treated? Do you have a decent audio interface? (RODEcaster Duo is top of the line IMO) As for mics. At my station I use an EV-RE20. By far the gold standard for broadcasting. After that the Sure SMB7 after that you can get away with the rode Podmic provided your room is sound treated and you have an interface like I mentioned above (focusrite is also good) Don't go cheap on the interface or mic. Sound matters

Facebook is full of smb7s. Also I'd argue the Electro-Voice RE20 is the gold standard.

RE20 is what I had in mind when I posted this. Gonna see if I can get my hands on one and test it out.

Sweet. Neither of these were on my radar for this purpose, will keep my eye out to see if I can try them. 

The dual mono setup sounds like it might be helpful, gonna see if I can design a little patch to pull that up on the fly, test it out and see if I can use it without it impacting the vibe in the room.

The way I see it is RE20 is the euro version of SM7B as it became more popular there. RE20 is definitely a nice mic and I recall Kerim Lechner (Krimh) call it the elephant dong. Definitely nice to have. I noticed SM7b works better with lo-z capable preamps as that surprisingly causes the volume to jump up 5-10dB!