Electro-Voice Model 655
Two hundred dollars in 1950 bought a microphone that weighed eleven ounces, reached from 40 to 15,000 cycles, and was calibrated by hand - and broadcasters lined up for it.
Overview
Pick one up and the first thing that registers is how little there is to it. Eleven ounces, per Electro-Voice's own advertising from the period — a slim cylinder barely an inch and a half across, 11½ inches long with the swivel attached and 8¾ without it. That swivel comes off. The finish was Alumilite or brown baked enamel with chrome trim, and the head was polished fluted aluminum. For television work in the early 1950s, when a microphone in frame was a problem to be solved, that concealability mattered as much as the frequency response.
The frequency response was the headline. Electro-Voice rated the 655 at 40 to 15,000 cycles per second, ±2.5 dB, with an output level of −53 dB below 6 mW. The advertising called it the only microphone with all of these features and leaned hard on the "Slim-Trim" name. Underneath the marketing the hardware was real: an Acoustalloy diaphragm, an Alnico V magnet in an Armco magnetic iron circuit, and an omnidirectional pattern that required no closely associated auxiliary equipment. No separate preamp, no power supply. The 655A variant added a pop-proof grille head to stop wind and breath blasts. The plain 655 relied on an integral blast filter in the head.
Two things about the 655 get lost in the spec-sheet recitation. First, each unit was individually laboratory calibrated. Manufacturers throw that claim around loosely, but in the period literature it's a real selling point and not a footnote. Second, the impedance: 250 ohms standard, easily changed to 50 ohms. That let the same microphone serve a broadcast console and a PA job without a transformer swap, and it's why the 655 shows up in so many settings in period photographs - network telecasts, remote hookups, sportscasting, street interviews, audience participation, high-quality sound reinforcement, recording. Electro-Voice pitched it as the answer to "complex microphone problems."
The price was $200 list, with a net of $120 to the trade. In 1950 dollars that was serious money for a station. Within the E-V line, the 654 listed at $95, the 646 at $140, the 635 at $75, and the 650 at $150. The 655 sat at the top of that family. Electro-Voice's advertising billed it as meeting "the highest standards of TV, FM and AM," which is marketing copy. The engineering claims behind it, the wide flat response and the ruggedness, were the ones the company kept repeating across years of ads.
Ruggedness is where the Acoustalloy diaphragm story gets interesting. E-V's copy claimed the diaphragm was blast-proof and corrosion-proof, able to withstand severe shock without internal damage, and - the detail that always gets repeated - unaffected in operating characteristics even after immersion in water. Read that last claim the way you'd read any ad copy. The durability reputation does have support, though. Audio (November 1964, p.100), in a fifteen-year retrospective piece, noted that many of the early 655s were still in dependable daily service well over a decade after introduction. It also described the original as the only omnidirectional dynamic microphone on the market when it launched, with ruler-flat response from 40 to 20,000 cps. That 20,000 figure is the magazine's characterization and not the rated spec. The contemporaneous E-V literature consistently says 15,000.
The connector situation is period-correct and slightly annoying today. Early literature specifies a Cannon XL-3 connector; later sheets list a Cannon UA-3. Either way it's a three-pin Cannon, and either way you'll be making or buying an adapter to get it into anything modern. Cable length varied by document — 18 feet in some, 20 feet of broadcast-type cable in others — which is the sort of inconsistency that shows up when a product runs for years and the copy gets revised piecemeal. Mounting was via ½-inch or ⅝"-27 thread, and the removable swivel is the part most often missing on the secondhand market. A 655 without its swivel still works, but you've lost half the reason the thing was designed the way it was.
By the late 1950s the line had moved on to the 655C, which E-V billed as the world's finest TV and broadcast microphone and which Audio (March 1958, p.94) placed at the head of what the company called its "First Family of Professional Microphones." The original 655 was superseded and not dropped outright, and the 1964 retrospective makes clear that the early units kept working long after the catalog moved on. They stayed in service for fifteen years and more.
What a buyer should know before chasing one: the finish options mean condition varies wildly, the swivels go missing, and the connectors require adaptation. What a buyer should also know is that the fundamental design — omnidirectional dynamic, no power required, wide flat response, light enough to hand-hold for an hour — is exactly as useful now as it was in 1950. Plug one into a modern interface through the right adapter and it does the job it was calibrated to do. That's not nostalgia talking. That's an eleven-ounce microphone that was individually tested before it left Buchanan, Michigan, and still measures like it.
eBay Listings
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.