Shure SM7B Microphone Review And Setup Sound As Good As Joe Rogan?

Shure SM7B Microphone Review And Setup

Shure SM7B Also known as the Joe Rogan Microphone

In this video we’re going to go hands-on with the shore sm7b cardioid dynamic microphone. This microphone is used by joe rogan to record the Joe Rogan experience podcast Robin Quivers of the Howard Stern, Show and was famously used by Michael Jackson to record thriller. This microphone has a long, successful history and is somewhat of an industry standard and, for those reasons, garnered my interests when looking for a replacement for my audio technica at 2020, which, incidentally, is also an awesome, starter microphone for anyone looking to get into podcasting or creating YouTube Videos so in this video I’m going to take you through my thought process on what I was looking for and why I ultimately pull the trigger on the shore. I’m also going to be using the mic throughout this video, so you can hear and judge the quality for yourself, as always in my hands-on videos, I’m not going to perform any audio post-processing. So what you hear is exactly what you get my goal for.

This microphone is to get good, clean, professional sounding audio with a super low noise floor, which is that white hissing sound of the audio that you don’t want and is most obvious during periods of silence. So, let’s talk about the environment where I’m in the room, I’m in is 16 feet by 18 feet and has a computer and disc array whirling. In the background, I have no acoustic treatments on the walls and the windows, so reflections and reverberations can be problematic. Normally, these are things that can be and are corrected in post with programs like Adobe Audition, but I picked up the mic because I’m lazy and I don’t want to post process audio ever if I can avoid it. Also, if you’re live-streaming post-processing is not necessarily an option, so let’s talk about the Mike’s features and why it’s ideally suited for my particular application.

The shure sm7b is a dynamic mic which essentially describes the technology is to convert sound waves into electrical energy. I won’t get into the physics of it here, but essentially dynamic mics are less sensitive than condenser mics and thus won’t readily pick up the weak extraneous signals that condensers do. It also has a cardioid or heart-shaped pickup pattern, which means it picks up sound from the front and not so much from the sides or the rear. It also features switchable response controls on the body, allowing you to change the input signal, processing from bass roll-off, which essentially removes low-frequency humming that might be present new room presence boosts, which adds vibrancy and volume to the input signal. If you have multiple microphones in the system, you might want to set your main hosts microphone to presence, boost and finally flat, which is ideal for spoken words and narration.

The body of the sm7b is shielded against electrical interference, so computers and electronics located nearby should not introduce noise and, finally, the microphone housing features. An internal air suspension, shock isolation. That’s a tongue twister. What this means is, you won’t need to purchase a separate shock mount to isolate the mic from physical vibrations. If you look at my old audio technica at2020, you can see the shock mount.

I have installed on to provide similar isolation. This isn’t needed for the shure sm7b because of the internal shock isolation. It also comes with two windshields, the standard and more puffy one as I like to call it. The puffier one is best for people doing voiceover work as it allows you to get all up inside that grille, while minimizing plosives. You know the Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

The microphone is an XLR mic. So if you’re going to connect this thing to your computer, you’re going to need some decent, balanced XLR cables, an audio interface like the focusrite scarlett 2i4 and a cloud lifter cl1 to bring the signal up to a usable level. Now this is not the only configuration you can use, but it’s the least expensive one. I could find that gets the job done and what I mean by that is the sm7b produces a very low output signal 59 DB, in fact, to get that up to line level you’re going to need to cleanly amplify that signal to 0 dB. The cloud lifter cl1 provides 20 DB of clean gain and sits between the mic and the audio amplifier.

The focusrite scarlett 2i4, which is the audio amplifier, then takes that output of the cloud lifter and allows you to amplify an additional 55 dB before converting that signal to USB, which you can then feed into your computer. This is important to understand because, if you don’t provide enough gain, you’ll be extremely unhappy with the results unless you scream into the mic. For me, the holy grail for sound is to produce a nice clean, professional audio signal without the needs of post-process. It’s not that you couldn’t post-process or you shouldn’t post-process, but for me I don’t want to have to post process, so I prefer to record the most pristine input I can get and use it, as is in an effort to reduce my production cycle time. Anyway.

That’s the shure sm7b. If you liked the quality of the unprocessed audio signal of this video and want to know the particulars of my setup

Start your podcast with the shure sm7b microphone you’ll be glad you and you’ll sound just as good as Joe Rogan.