Shure SM99
A miniature gooseneck condenser built to disappear into a pulpit and keep feedback at arm's length.
Overview
The SM99 covers 80 to 20,000 Hz from a gooseneck small enough to vanish against a lectern. Shure pitched it at the multi-mic installation market: churches, schools, courtrooms, council chambers, boardrooms, broadcast studios. These are places where a dozen open mics fight the same room and gain-before-feedback is the whole job. The company's own literature called it the most versatile miniature gooseneck condenser available. That's marketing, but the spec sheet behind the claim is more interesting than the slogan.
The pickup is supercardioid, and Shure called the pattern uniform. That means consistent rejection of the rear hemisphere across the band, not a pattern that only behaves in the midrange. It makes a gooseneck usable on a podium. The talker can move a little without falling off-axis, and the room's PA stays in the null. The response out to 20 kHz is the other half of the pitch. A condenser with that reach captures the articulation of speech, like consonants and the leading edge of a syllable, that a dynamic podium mic tends to round off. It's also why the same microphone gets used for acoustic instruments as readily as for a lectern.
On the electrical side, Shure aimed at installers rather than performers. The SM99 has an integrated low-noise preamplifier, so it doesn't need a separate outboard stage to reach usable level. The circuitry is described as fully protected from RFI and electromagnetic hum pickup. In a courtroom or a broadcast studio that matters, because the alternative is a mic that hums every time a dimmer or a fluorescent ballast kicks on. The quiet front end also buys dynamic range, which for speech in a reverberant room counts for more than outright sensitivity.
Impedance is rated at 150 ohms, a standard low-impedance figure that suits the transformer-coupled inputs on the consoles and mixers these installations tend to run. Pricing is where the sources get slippery.
The SM99 reflects Shure's read on the installed-sound market of the late 1980s: a condenser designed around gain-before-feedback and source isolation first, with the gooseneck form factor as the delivery mechanism. It isn't a stage mic and doesn't pretend to be. It's the microphone you mount once, aim carefully, and leave alone.
eBay Listings
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.