Sennheiser ME 66
A short shotgun capsule that trades on a simple trick — supercardioid down low, true shotgun up top — and has been riding in ENG kits ever since.
Overview
The ME 66 is not a microphone you buy on its own and plug into a mixer. It's a capsule — the business end of Sennheiser's K6 modular system — and the first thing to understand about it is that the capsule and the body are two separate purchases. Sennheiser's own distributor literature lists the ME 66 capsule at $235.00, and the K6 powering module — which handles both phantom power and a plain AA battery — at $239.00. So a working ME 66 in the field is really a two-part investment, and collectors hunting for one should confirm which half they're actually getting.
What the capsule does is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly: it combines a supercardioid pattern at low frequencies with a shotgun pattern above 2000 Hz. That's not a marketing flourish — it's the design. The supercardioid behavior down low keeps the mic from getting thin and phasey on speech fundamentals, while the interference-tube shotgun behavior up top gives you the directional reach that makes a short shotgun useful for grabbing dialogue at a distance. Sennheiser's literature rates the capsule from 50 Hz to 20 kHz, and describes it as a "short shotgun" — the short part matters, because it's the reason the capsule is light enough to hold in a handheld boom or pistol grip for a long shoot day without your arm filing a complaint.
The modular architecture is the other half of the story. The K6 body accepts a range of capsules, and the ME 66 is one of several heads that screw onto it. Sennheiser's catalog lists the ME 64 cardioid, the ME 65 supercardioid handheld, the ME 67 spot shotgun, and the MKE2-60 omni lavalier alongside the ME 66 — all sharing the same powering module. That's the appeal of the system: one body, several capsules, and a kit that adapts to the room instead of forcing you to carry three complete microphones. It also means the ME 66's practical value depends heavily on whether the K6 body you pair it with is healthy, since a dead preamp makes a perfectly good capsule useless.
Period coverage of the K6 line confirms the system was understood this way at the time. Studio Sound (April 1994, p.14) noted that Sennheiser had for years included some form of modular microphone system in its catalog, and described the K6 roundup as a set comprising the K6-P body, an ME64 cardioid, an ME62 omni, and an ME66 supercardioid — the review set built around the chop-and-change philosophy the line was designed for. That's a useful period snapshot: the ME 66 was reviewed as one head in a system, not as a standalone product, which is exactly how it should be evaluated today.
The ME 66 also turns up in real broadcast and live-production inventories rather than only in review columns. Sennheiser's own advertising in Mix (April 2002, p.23) positioned the K6-series ME 66 and ME 67 alongside the MKH 60, MKH 70, and MKH 416 as the company's professional shotgun lineup, and noted the firm had won an Academy Award for its shotgun technology — marketing copy, to be clear, not an independent verdict, but a fair indication of how Sennheiser wanted the capsule placed. Broadcast facility equipment lists from the period show ME 66 capsules in working inventories alongside Sennheiser HMD 25 headsets and MD 421 dynamics, and one arena broadcast writeup describes ME 66 shotguns placed in a booth for effects miking. The capsule's real habitat, in other words, was the same one it occupies now: clipped to a boom, pointed at something that won't come closer.
Owners and collectors should go in with realistic expectations. The ME 66 is a capsule, so there's no circuit to recap and no switches to clean — the failure points live in the K6 body and in the capsule's own diaphragm and interference tube, which are the parts that take abuse in the field. Because the capsule was sold separately and at a not-insignificant price, the secondhand market is full of heads separated from their bodies, and matching a loose ME 66 to a loose K6 is the normal way these get reassembled. The 50 Hz – 20 kHz rating and the supercardioid-plus-shotgun design are the two facts worth carrying into any purchase decision; everything else about a given example is condition, and condition on a field microphone is everything.
What makes the ME 66 worth seeking out is that it does one job — directional speech and effects capture at moderate distance — in a package light enough to actually use. It isn't a studio condenser and shouldn't be judged as one. It's the capsule you screw onto a K6, point at a crowd or a podium or a hockey booth, and trust to reject the room. For anyone building a K6 system, it's the short shotgun head that makes the modular idea pay off.
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