Electro-Voice Model 643 Cardiline
Seven feet of microphone that reaches two city blocks and once won E-V an Academy Award.
Overview
Seven feet. That is the first thing anyone says about the Electro-Voice Model 643, and it is the thing that never stops being strange. A dynamic microphone the length of a tall man's arm — actually longer — that E-V itself cheerfully called "the biggest microphone in captivity." It was not a stunt. The 643 was a genuine long-range pickup tool built around E-V's Cardiline principle, and the company's own advertising claimed it was the most directional broadcast microphone on the market, capable of pulling clean, natural sound from reporters standing up to 50 feet away.
The pitch, as E-V told it in its period advertising, was simple: watch a presidential news conference and look for the "bazooka" parked beside each TV camera. That was a 643, positioned well back from the press gaggle so it could pick up the room without the forest of handheld mics that usually cluttered the shot. The same trick worked on marching bands at football games and parades, where the literature claims the 643 pulled recording-fidelity sound from up to two city blocks out, and in TV and film studios and on remotes, where it reportedly delivered clean dialogue despite wind and noise that would ruin an ordinary microphone's take.
What the 643 really was, under the marketing, was a research instrument that happened to be sellable. E-V's own copy describes it as one of the company's most effective field research tools, an object lesson in the nature of directional microphones and their applications. The Cardiline principle carried Patent No. 3095084, and the knowledge gained from building a seven-foot line microphone fed straight back into the product line — shortened versions of the same idea, and refinements to E-V's Continuously Variable-D cardioid designs. The 643 was the extreme case that made the rest possible.
The design earned E-V the first Academy Award for microphone design in 22 years, according to the company's own account — a genuine piece of industry recognition, not a self-awarded badge. Contemporary coverage treated the 643 as a legitimate technical achievement rather than a curiosity: High Fidelity (September 1967, p.131) ran E-V's "new shape of progress" campaign, leading with the seven-foot microphone as the flagship example of the company going to unusual lengths to make better sound, and the same campaign appeared in HiFi/Stereo (October 1967, p.102) and again that December (p.26). It was, in other words, the product E-V chose to put in front of the hi-fi buying public as proof of what the company could do.
Price was never subtle. E-V listed the Model 643 at $1,560.00, with normal trade discounts applying to the list price — a serious professional number for a serious professional tool, and one that put it well out of reach of the casual recordist. Nobody bought a 643 to record their folk group in the living room. It went where the sound was far away and the client had a budget: network television, film sets, stadium sidelines, and any remote where a conventional mic simply could not get close enough.
Owners and collectors today know the 643 as a piece that is equal parts engineering artifact and logistical headache. It is long, it is heavy in a way that makes ordinary boom hardware nervous, and it needs the right suspension and the right wind protection to do what it was built to do. The Acoustifoam screen is a wear item on a microphone this old, and the foam on surviving examples is frequently the first thing to go. The reward for the trouble is a sound and a reach that almost nothing else in a mic locker can match — a genuine long-throw directional tool with a patent number and an Academy Award behind it, and a silhouette that no one who has seen one ever forgets.
For the collector, the 643 sits in a peculiar place: too specialized to be a daily driver, too historically significant to ignore, and rare enough that examples turn up sporadically rather than regularly. It is the kind of microphone that gets bought by someone who already has the practical mics and wants the one that makes visitors stop and stare. The fact that E-V built it at all — and then used it as the centerpiece of a national advertising campaign — says plenty about how the company saw itself in the late 1960s.
Similar items on eBay
No exact Electro-Voice MODEL-643 listings are live right now — these searches show current Electro-Voice and similar vintage audio gear on eBay:
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.