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I have a love/hate relationship with the SM7B. On one hand, I think it’s an amazing sounding microphone and fits just about every voice and every scenario I can think of. On the other hand, it sounds so bad when poorly setup and most of the time, you only find poorly setup SM7Bs. And for very good reason, it’s really expensive to get the most out of it.

To break down my setup, it looks like this:

• SM7B ($400)
• Triton Fethead ($80)
• DBX 286s ($200 at the time, $300 now)
• SSL2 ($180)
• Total = $860 (not including tax/shipping)

This is, frankly, absurd, and the quality that I gain out of spending this kind of money isn’t worth it. You can very easily get audio that sounds just as good if not better for literally have that price and with a far more simple setup. So why would I do it?

To prove a point.

Mostly, anyway.

After buying a Stellar X2 (lovely mic) and a Rode Podmic (questionable mic), I was in the market for a “forever” mic. Something that was sturdy and reliable, something that I could throw into just about any context and have it perform with as little editing or processing as possible. The candidates were the SM7B, Rodecaster Pro, and RE20 because I really like dynamic mics. When I was thinking about this, I happened to click into a Twitch stream where the streamer was using an SM7B and they were so muffled and their bass was boosted so high that it sounded like they were on the other side of a wall. Within a day, I was watching a podcast where everyone was using SM7Bs, and everyone sounded incredibly dull.

The people I know that have SM7Bs all have problems with it. Either they sound muffled, dead, or dull, or it’s so noisy that it ruins recordings and doing anything other than screaming into them sounds awful. I had the thought:

There’s no way the SM7B is that difficult to use.

That night, I placed an order for one.

Funny enough, I didn’t really had any of those problems. The 286s has more than enough gain for it and a low noise preamp. The SSL is also very quiet. Between being able to control the input and the output gain, it wasn’t that hard to get a healthy signal with a good signal to noise ratio. I was even surprised that when I whispered into it, it was loud and clear, something that from the experiences of others is reall difficult to get. With subtle EQ, an expander, and a hint of compression, it gave me exactly what I wanted.

Until I started to actually record low signal audio.

Most of what I record requires me to speak quite softly. My speaking voice, generally, isn’t that loud either. When talking, you really don’t hear that much noise. There’s a softness to it and it’s not something that I would want to send in for production, but it’s pretty subtle. Until you start chopping up audio and having it right next to actual silence. It’s…very obvious how much noise there is. And once you hear it (and see it), you can’t unhear it. Which is where the fethead comes in and solves just about everything.

In the end, me trying to prove the point that the SM7B isn’t that difficult to set up ended up in me spending a lot of time and money getting it to work to the point where I’m comfortable sending something in for production. Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that the “SM7B sound” isn’t desired in most productions but that’s a different problem.

That’s not to say it wasn’t worth it, though. Actually, unless work demands it, I don’t have any intention of swapping mics any time soon. The sound that comes out of the SM7B with this setup is so, so good (to me). It’s the first time I’ve listened back to my recordings without having the feeling of needing to even do mild EQing to change the way I sound. It’s a “dull” sound still in the sense that it doesn’t have an overly bright high end but for a voice like mine that doesn’t really have a high end anyway, it compliments it completely. The smoothness of the lows and low mids adds this feeling to it that gets me excited to record. It gets me excited to try new things with my voice and see how it comes out.

That is the true value of this mic.