Shure Beta 87A

A hand-held electret condenser that needs phantom power and gives you a presence rise and a supercardioid pattern tight enough to keep the rest of the stage out of your vocal channel.

Overview

The Beta 87A is Shure's premium hand-held electret condenser vocal microphone. It has a supercardioid element and is aimed at professional sound reinforcement, broadcasting, and studio recording. That's the manufacturer's own framing, and it's an unusually honest one - this mic is meant to be held in a fist on a loud stage and still behave like a studio tool. The capsule is an electret condenser rather than a dynamic, and that is the point of the model. Condensers bring sensitivity and top-end detail that moving-coil dynamics in the same hand-held form factor generally can't match.

The price of that sensitivity is phantom power. The Beta 87A will not run off a stage box that doesn't supply it. Shure's documentation specifies 11 to 52 Vdc phantom voltage. That window is wide enough that essentially any preamp, mixer, or console with built-in phantom power will drive it, and the manual names the Shure PS1A as an external supply for situations where the board can't provide it. If the desk has phantom power, the 87A plugs in and behaves. If it doesn't, the mic is dead weight until a supply is found. That's not a flaw, it's the trade for the condenser element, but it's the first thing to confirm about a rig.

The pattern is supercardioid, with null points at approximately 125° per Shure's own documentation. A supercardioid's rear nulls sit off-axis rather than directly behind the capsule. That means the 87A rejects strongly at the angles where monitor wedges and adjacent instruments tend to sit, while offering what the manual describes as minimal off-axis coloration. For a vocalist sharing a stage with a drum kit and a guitar amp, deep rejection plus consistent off-axis tone is the useful combination. The tight pattern also lets the mic be worked close without dragging the whole room into the channel.

Close work is where the 87A's voicing gets interesting. Like any unidirectional microphone, it has proximity effect. Shure's documentation puts the bass boost at 10 to 15 dB at 100 Hz when the capsule sits roughly 6 mm - a quarter inch - from the source. That's a big low-end lift, and on a condenser with this much output it can turn a close-miked vocal into a boomy mess. Shure's answer is a controlled low-frequency roll-off built into the mic's response. The manual says it compensates for proximity effect and prevents the "boomy" sound associated with close pick-up. The roll-off is progressive rather than a hard filter, so the singer can still lean in and use proximity effect for a warmer, more powerful tone. Above that, the characteristic Shure presence rise brightens the upper midrange, which lets a vocal cut through a dense stage mix without aggressive EQ.

The manual's own summary of the design intent is worth taking at face value: exceptionally smooth frequency response and high SPL capability, packaged with the ruggedness needed for touring and field production. A condenser that can't survive a tour is useless no matter how good it sounds, and Shure built this one for exactly that duty cycle. That combination — condenser detail, supercardioid isolation, touring-grade construction — is why the 87A became a fixture on professional stages rather than a studio-only piece.