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.