Shure FP22

Sixteen ounces of field-ready stereo monitoring, with a routing trick that solves a problem most headphone amps never think about.

Overview

The FP22 is a stereo headphone amplifier built for the field, and the spec that tells you what it is comes from the weight: 16 ounces. That's a belt-clip device, not a rack piece — something a location recordist clips on and forgets about while chasing a boom through a room. Shure's own catalog copy sells the attached belt clip as exactly that: set it and forget it. The metal-adjacent, utilitarian description in the distributor listings reinforces the working-tool intent. This is not a hi-fi accessory; it's a monitoring utility for people who move.

The headline feature is what Shure calls "Stereo+I" — the ability to mix a mono signal and a stereo signal any way the user wishes, with either or both signals routed to either or both ears. That sounds like marketing until you think about what it actually does in practice. A recordist monitoring a stereo pair on one input and a mono feed — a talkback, a reference, a director's channel — on another can decide independently what goes where. The mono feed can sit in one ear while the stereo pair stays intact, or both signals can be blended into both ears. Distributor documentation describes the routing as fully user-defined rather than a fixed mono/stereo switch, which is the whole point of the design.

Power is flexible in a way that field gear needs to be: one 9V battery, or 12–24VDC from an external supply. That dual path matters on a shoot where AC is unreliable and battery changes are a nuisance. Connectors are XLR and phone jack, and loop-through bridging lets units be chained together — so a single feed can be passed down a line of listeners without a distribution amp. The FP22 is also, per Shure's documentation, 16dB quieter than its predecessor, the FP12. That's a meaningful number for a headphone amp, where self-noise sits directly in the listener's ear.

Pricing in the distributor listings is inconsistent, and that inconsistency is itself a useful data point: the same FP22 is listed at $375.00, $395.00, and $450.00 across different catalog sheets, which is what happens when a product sits in a dealer price book across revisions. Collectors should treat the MFR list price as roughly in the mid-three-hundreds to mid-four-hundreds rather than pinning a single figure. The 60SHFP22 part number is the consistent identifier across all of them.

The FP22 sits in Shure's FP field-production family, alongside the FP11 mic/line amp, the FP33 portable stereo mixer, the FP42 stereo mixer, the FP16A distribution amp, and the M367 mono mixer. That context is worth noting because the FP22 is the monitoring endpoint of that chain — the thing you plug into after the mixer to actually hear what you're recording. It's a supporting player in the lineup, not the star, but it's the one the recordist's ears live on.

What the documentation does not give is production years, frequency response, impedance, or a review record. That's a gap, and it's worth being honest about: this is a piece known through its manufacturer and distributor documentation rather than through critical reception.

For a working recordist, the FP22's appeal is legible even without a review: belt-clip portability, dual power, flexible mono/stereo routing, and chainable outputs. For a collector, it's a functional oddity from Shure's field-production line — the kind of gear that was bought to be used hard and rarely survived in pristine shape. Values are not documented here, and that's a gap worth flagging rather than filling with guesswork.