Electro-Voice RE10

Name: Electro-Voice RE10
Brand: Electro-Voice

Electro-Voice's "economy version of the RE15" - the same Continuously Variable-D idea, sold for a fraction of the flagship price.

Overview

Electro-Voice built the RE10 for engineers who wanted the RE15's sound but couldn't justify the RE15's price. The company's own advertising copy calls it plainly "the economy version of the RE15" - "the same concept and quality, but for slightly less rigid requirements." That is the whole pitch. E-V never pretended the RE10 was the flagship. It was the affordable way into the family.

The RE10 shares the core technology with its more expensive siblings. The advertising copy is built around Electro-Voice's Continuously Variable-D construction (U.S. Patent No. 3,115,207). The company claimed this design kept response constant no matter how the performer moved - close in, far off, or even behind the mic. As E-V framed it, only the level changes with distance and angle, never the tonal balance, so once you set equalization it stays set. The same literature describes the RE10's cardioid pattern as super-cardioid, with maximum rejection 150° off axis. It also has an integral bass-tilt circuit to cut rumble below 100 Hz when needed.

All of that is manufacturer copy, and it should be read that way. The RE10's real distinction is price, and the documented figures move around considerably across the years and publications. Audio (April 1969, p.80) listed the new RE10 at $90.00, with the RE15 at $153.00 and the RE16 at $159.00. By January 1970 the same magazine still carried the RE10 at $90.00 (p.88). Then the numbers climb. DB-Magazine (August 1972, p.68) and the same month's Recording-Engineer (October 1972, p.12) both list the RE10 at $166.00, with the RE15 at $283.00 and the RE16 at $294.50. A later Recording-Engineer insertion (October 1974, p.12) shows a suggested professional net of $110.00 for the RE10. These are the advertised figures of their moment, not a single settled price. E-V's list prices clearly shifted with the times, and the "suggested professional net" language in the 1974 ad signals that dealers were working from a different number than the headline list.

The RE10 also had a dedicated accessory. The Model 411 "stage mouse" is a half-cylinder block of Acoustifoam about eight inches long with a hollow core. It was designed to hold the microphone head within half an inch of the floor for the company's "floor wave" distant-pickup technique, and it was made specifically for the RE10 and RE15. It provided an integral windscreen, dust protection, and impact shielding, and E-V priced it at under $10.00 to professional users. The budget RE10 got the same purpose-built floor mount as the flagship.

The archive has no independent measurement of the RE10 - no lab curves, no frequency-response plots, no off-axis data beyond E-V's own claims. The documented record is advertising and the accessory literature. What can be said with confidence is the identity and the family position: a super-cardioid dynamic, the economy member of the RE15/RE16/RE11 line, sold from at least 1969 into the mid-1970s at prices that started around $90 and rose past $160 as the decade wore on.