Electro-Voice Model 644 Sound Spot
A microphone for the church, the auditorium and the amphitheater - places where a cardioid gives up before the sound reaches it.
Overview
Anyone who has worked sound in a big room knows the problem. In a church nave or a reverberant auditorium, you can't put the microphone close to the source. The architecture, the sightlines or the size of the space won't allow it. So you back the mic off, and you lose level and "presence" with every foot you retreat. Electro-Voice built the Model 644 Sound Spot for that bind. It is a directional microphone made to reach farther into a room than a conventional cardioid can. It does this by narrowing what it listens to, not by brute force.
The mechanism is the Cardiline principle. The 644 keeps acceptance within an included angle of 90° at high frequencies, which is a tight window for a microphone of its era. That narrowness buys the extra working distance. Electro-Voice's own advertising billed the Sound Spot as reaching "up to four times the working distance of cardioid types," and the company was candid that the point was solving the impossible jobs in commercial sound. A general-purpose microphone could not sit at a conventional distance from the source in these spaces without the room swallowing the pickup.
The 644 is a scaled-down version of a bigger idea. The Cardiline concept was proven on the enormous Model 643, the seven-foot "monster" microphone, the most directional microphone sold at the time, a design that helped Electro-Voice win the first Academy Award for microphone design in 22 years. The 644 takes the same Cardiline principle and packages it in a body just 16 inches long. The 643 was a research and field instrument as much as a product. The 644 was the practical, deployable result of what that research taught about directional pickup.
The commercial framing explains who bought these. Electro-Voice pitched the 644 at the commercial sound contractor, the people taking on the jobs that "couldn't be done" in churches, auditoriums and amphitheaters where ordinary microphones failed. Audio (September 1960, p.43) laid out the case, describing how reverberant, spacious rooms degrade audio quality and force microphones away from the source. It then presented the Sound Spot as the answer to that loss of level and presence. This was a working tool for installed sound.
The 644's place in the Cardiline family can be traced from the contemporary record. The 643 was the giant that proved the principle. The 644 was the 16-inch practical version. The 642 Cardiline would go on to earn the first Academy Award for microphone design, which Audio (June 1963, p.60) reported under a headline saying the Model 642 had earned that honor. Collectors who follow the Cardiline line tend to treat the 644 as the working middle child, the one that carried the directional breakthrough into real installs.
Pricing in period advertising put the Sound Spot at a list price of $110.00, which placed it well above the general-purpose dynamics in the Electro-Voice line — the Model 611 omnidirectional listed at $45.00, the Model 623 at $57.00, and the Model 636 "Slimair" at $72.50 in the same 1963 Audio (February 1963, p.35) roundup. That spread is the clearest statement of what the 644 was: a specialist instrument priced for the contractor who needed to solve a room no ordinary microphone could handle, not the casual buyer.
For the modern collector, the 644 is a niche piece. It is not the famous Cardiline, since that distinction belongs to the 642 and the outsized 643, but it shows the principle in a usable, install-friendly form. Buyers should expect a purpose-built directional microphone whose value lies in its Cardiline heritage and its documented role in commercial sound, not in general-purpose studio appeal. As with any microphone of this vintage, condition and completeness drive everything. The historical record is thin on later production and current market pricing.
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