Electro-Voice RE15 (c. 1969–1976)
A cardioid dynamic that kept its tone no matter what the talent did with it, and spent the seventies being advertised as tougher than the sun.
Overview
The RE15 is the microphone Electro-Voice built its late-sixties and seventies professional line around. It is a dynamic cardioid. What set it apart was E-V's Continuously Variable-D construction - the company's own term, protected under U.S. Patent No. 3,115,207. E-V claimed it kept the response essentially constant regardless of how the performer worked the microphone. Close on the grille, backed off across the stage, even swung around behind the capsule: according to E-V's advertising, only the level changed, not the tonal balance. Once an engineer set equalization, the pitch went, it stayed set from dress rehearsal through the final performance. That is a manufacturer's claim and should be read as one. It was the entire sales argument for the microphone, and it explains why the RE15 became a broadcast and sound-reinforcement staple rather than a studio curiosity.
The polar pattern E-V advertised was supercardioid rather than plain cardioid, with maximum rejection specified at 150° off axis. For an engineer fighting monitor bleed or a noisy room, that meant a deeper null to aim with than an ordinary cardioid offered, while still keeping a normal stand or boom position. E-V also built in a bass-tilt circuit to roll off rumble below 100 Hz when needed. The accessories were part of the pitch too. The Model 307 suspension mount was the intended shock-isolation companion. The Model 411 was a half-cylinder block of Acoustifoam about eight inches long with a hollow core, designed exclusively for the RE10 and RE15. It let engineers lay the microphone within half an inch of a floor to exploit what E-V's engineers called the "floor wave" pickup technique. The foam block, informally nicknamed the "stage mouse," was washable, had no moving parts, and cost professional users less than $10.00. It is cheap and ugly, and E-V sold it as genuinely useful.
The RE15 anchored a family. E-V advertised it alongside the RE16, the same microphone with an external pop filter for ultra-close work, plus the RE10 as an economy version of the RE15 and the RE11 as the lower-cost twin to the RE16. A later round of advertising added the RE18. The RE15 was the original of the group, and the others were variations on it. E-V's copy was explicit that the concept and quality carried down the line while the price came down with it.
Pricing moved over the years. In April 1969, Audio (April 1969, p.80) carried E-V's suggested net of $153.00 for the RE15, with the Model 307 suspension mount at $5.70 and the RE10 at $90.00. By the August 1972 DB listing the RE15 had climbed to $283.00 list, with the 307 mount at $37.00, the RE10 at $166.00, the RE11 at $177.50, and the RE16 at $294.50. A later insertion in the same campaign, running in Recording Engineer (February 1975, p.16), continued to promote the RE15 as a flagship model. The spread between the $283.00 and $265.00 figures is not a price change so much as two different printings of the same advertising, list versus a slightly different schedule, and collectors should not read too much into it. A microphone that sold for $153 in 1969 was being advertised at roughly $265-283 by 1972, which is serious professional money for a dynamic in that era.
The reliability angle was not subtle. E-V's advertising through 1975 and 1976, running repeatedly in DB Magazine and Recording Engineer, conceded "only the slightest of edges to the sun" and then listed the features that backed the boast. A "hum buck" coil supplying an extra 25 dB of hum rejection was among them. That coil matters in real rooms full of lighting dimmers and transformer fields, and it tends to get left out of cheaper microphones. The campaign ran for at least a year and a half across two publications, so E-V clearly considered the RE15 a flagship worth continuous advertising spend rather than a one-off insertion.
The archive has no independent laboratory measurement of the RE15. No magazine review with a measured frequency-response curve has surfaced, no service documentation, and no confirmed production start or end date. The years given here are an estimate drawn from the documented advertising and price-listing window, not a confirmed production run. The frequency response, impedance, sensitivity, weight, and connector type remain undocumented in the available sources. Anyone who needs those figures should go to an original E-V data sheet rather than trusting a reseller listing.
What Owners and Engineers Report
The family context matters for buyers. The RE10 was the economy RE15 and the RE16 was the RE15 with a pop filter, so a used-market shopper who finds an RE16 at a good price is essentially getting the same capsule with an extra screen. The RE11 was the lower-cost twin to the RE16. The RE18 came later in the advertising cycle. None of these are the RE15, but knowing the ladder helps explain why RE15 asking prices sit where they do. It is the original, and originals carry a premium.
Collectibility and Market
The RE15 occupies an odd place in the vintage microphone market. It is not a Neumann tube condenser, so it does not command the four-figure sums that the studio-classic dynamics and condensers do. But it is a genuine professional broadcast and sound-reinforcement microphone from a period when E-V was a serious player, it has a real technical story in the Variable-D patent, and it was advertised continuously for the better part of a decade.
For anyone shopping: verify that the hum-bucking coil and bass-tilt circuit are intact and functioning, confirm the connector type matches what you plan to plug into, and do not pay a premium for a mount that is not the correct 307. The RE15 is a working microphone, not a museum piece.
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