Shure SM5B
A broadcast boom microphone built to hear dialogue and ignore everything else — including, apparently, the passing decades.
Overview
The SM5B is a unidirectional dynamic boom microphone with a frequency response of 50 to 15,000 Hz. That's the whole of the hard specification available on this page, and it's worth sitting with for a moment, because the SM5B's reputation rests on something the spec sheet can't express: the way it behaves in a room full of noise that isn't the person talking.
Shure's own advertising for the SM5B made the claim plainly. The copy ran under the headline that this boom microphone ignores everything except the dialogue, and the pitch was that consistency of soundtrack quality across an endless variety of locations and sets could be dramatically improved with it. The reasoning offered was that the microphone heard the dialogue rather than the ever-changing character of the surroundings. That's marketing language, and collectors should treat it as such — but the specific mechanism it describes is not hand-waving. The cardioid directional pattern is what does the work, and the ads pointed directly at it: because the pattern rejects what's off-axis, changes on the set or in transfer are seldom, if ever, necessary. This language appeared in Audio (March 1967, p.53) and again in DB-Magazine (February 1969, p.27), which tells you something about how long Shure kept running the same argument — and how well it kept landing.
The other piece of the design that the period copy dwells on is the windscreen. The SM5B's attached windscreen completely encloses a two-stage mechanical filter, which means there are no external rubber bands for the wind to strum. Anyone who has worked a boom on location knows exactly what problem that solves: the elastic suspension on a conventional mic is a wind instrument waiting to happen, and the SM5B's arrangement puts the filter inside the housing instead of hanging it off the outside. Again, this is advertising copy, not an independent measurement — but it's a concrete design claim, and it explains why the mic turns up in the field rather than staying in the studio.
Because that's the real story here. The SM5B was developed specially for recording studio applications, and it's suitable for boom work — the cardioid pattern being the reason it can reject background noise while a boom operator chases a moving subject. A companion model, the SM58, took the unidirectional approach in a different direction: it has a built-in wind and pop filter and was pitched at studio vocal recording, broadcast, and public performance. The SM5B is the boom microphone of that pair, not the hand-held. Collectors who confuse the two are comparing a location tool to a stage tool.
What the SM5B actually did for a living is documented in the equipment lists of the facilities that owned them. One broadcast production room centered on a Pacific Recorders BMX II 14-fader board listed Shure SM5B microphones among its gear, alongside Orban compressors and equalizers, an Eventide H949 Harmonizer, Otari MTR-10 reel-to-reels, and JBL 4411 speakers. A separate station equipment list — a much longer inventory running from Adobe Audition and BroadcastTools switchers through Harris consoles, Denon CD players, Sennheiser MD-421s, and Sony DAT machines — also names the Shure SM5B. These aren't reviews; they're the paper trail of working radio stations that bought the mic and kept it in service across decades of format and technology change. That's a more honest endorsement than any ad.
The frequency response figure itself — 50 to 15,000 Hz — is worth reading carefully rather than glossing. It's a wide range for a dynamic boom mic of the period, and it's the kind of bandwidth you want when the source is speech that has to sound natural rather than merely intelligible. The SM5B is a dynamic, not a condenser, which in a boom application means no phantom power to worry about and a capsule that shrugs off the humidity and temperature swings of a location shoot. Whether that range was measured under the conditions Shure claimed is not something this archive can verify; the figure comes from distributor documentation listing the SM5B as a unidirectional dynamic boom microphone, frequency range 50 to 15,000 Hz.
The distributor listing also gives a price: 49,500 in the currency of that catalog. That number is preserved here without conversion because the source doesn't state the currency or the year of the listing, and inventing either would be worse than leaving it alone. What can be said is that the SM5B sat well above the SM58 in the same catalog — the SM58 listed at 15,995 — which puts the boom microphone firmly in professional facility territory rather than the weekend-warrior bracket. That price gap is the clearest signal available of who Shure thought was buying it.
Production years for the SM5B are not documented in the sources available to this archive, and the period advertising gives only a rough bracket: the mic was being advertised in Audio in March 1967 and still being advertised in DB-Magazine in February 1969. That's a floor and a ceiling on the ad campaign, not on the production run, and the two should not be conflated. Collectors chasing a date code should treat the advertising window as a starting point only.
On the question of collectibility, this archive has no reliable market data for the SM5B — no auction records, no documented failure modes, no parts availability notes. What can be said is that the mic's value to a working studio or station is bound up in the same thing that made it useful in 1967: a cardioid dynamic that handles boom work without drama. The attached windscreen and enclosed two-stage filter are the parts most likely to need attention on any example that's spent decades in service, and buyers should inspect them closely, but that's a general observation about the design as described in period copy rather than a documented failure pattern. The honest answer is that the SM5B is a professional tool with a paper trail in broadcast facilities, and its standing among collectors will depend on condition and completeness rather than on any documented rarity.
eBay Listings
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.