Electro-Voice 666
A dynamic microphone that engineers claim you could hammer a nail with - and that Brian Wilson's crew put in front of nearly everything on Pet Sounds.
Overview
The 666 is an Electro-Voice dynamic that earned its reputation in the room, not on the spec sheet. The period record is rich on one point and thin on most others: engineers who worked with the 666 remember it as a tank. Writing in EQ (December 1992, p.92), one maintenance columnist noted that people swear you can hammer a nail with an old Electro-Voice EV-666. He admitted to having personally attested to it, and warned that doing so severely shortens the microphone's life.
The microphone's strongest claim to history comes from the Pet Sounds sessions. In a retrospective interview published in EQ, engineer Mark Linett described the microphone locker at Western Recorders during those sessions: Electro-Voice EV666s alongside AKG C60s, Shure 545s, a few Neumann U47s and RCA 77DXs. He stated plainly that the EV666 was the predominant microphone on the album, with the Shure 545 a close second. The same account notes that placement varied widely and that the C60 and 545 shared drum-overhead duties, but the 666 was the workhorse.
The 666 also turns up in broadcast use. A reader's letter in the same EQ pages recalled competing on a Detroit TV quiz show in spring 1963 where the EV 666 was the microphone in use, and remembered settling for the cheaper brushed-aluminum 664 at home. That does two things. It places the 666 in service by the early 1960s, and it establishes the 664 as the lower-cost sibling in the line, the one budget-minded buyers chose when the 666 was out of reach.
What the archive can document about the 666's physical package is limited and comes largely through its accessory. The Model 366 suspension shock mount was built expressly for the 666. It is an extremely light boom suspension, designed so that the combined weight of mount and microphone comes to 17 ounces, which the documentation frames as the solution to a whole class of boom-operation problems. The mount needs no tools to install the microphone, and its pigtail cable connection with UA-3 connectors forms a cable loop that isolates boom shock noise. The same mount is specified for any microphone with a one-inch diameter, naming the 666 alongside the 655 and 646. So the 666's body diameter is documented at one inch by association. Its element type, frequency response, polar pattern, impedance, and output level are not established by the sources on hand, and this page will not guess at them.
The 666's reputation rests on how it was used and how it survived, not on a published curve. Collectors chasing one should expect a heavy, one-inch-diameter dynamic with a documented place in the Pet Sounds chain and a documented place on a 1963 TV soundstage. Any seller's spec claims are unverified until a manual surfaces. The 366 shock mount is the accessory to look for, since it was purpose-built for this microphone.
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