[Boatanchors] EV-664 opinions?

[Richard Knoppow]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brian Harris" <cosmophone at yahoo.com>
To: "Boat Anchors" <boatanchors at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Monday, February 14, 2011 11:07 AM
Subject: [Boatanchors] EV-664 opinions?


> Today I bought a small estate which included an 
> Electrovoice EV-664.  I would
> like to hear your experienced opinions of this microphone 
> and how it compares to
> a D-104, of which I am a big fan (have twenty or more of 
> them).  If it's any
> good it will be used with one of my many boatanchors.
>
> Brian Harris, WA5UEK
> phone 214-763-5977
> email cosmophone at yahoo.com
> website www.myhamshack.com/wa5uek

      With the possibility of being a bit OT, the 664 has an 
interesting history.
      Electro-Voice was a large manufacturer of mostly 
public address mics although they made a couple aimed at 
broadcasting. Sometime in the late 1940's they began to use 
a diaphragm material made of a plastic mixture which they 
called Acoustaloy. This had the advantage over the then 
commonly used pressure formed aluminum or aluminum alloy 
material of being very light and highly reproducable. 
Because it didn't have the mechanical strains in it caused 
by the forming method for metal diaphragms it did not need 
annealing and was therefore much cheaper as well as having a 
much higher acceptance rate. The lack of strains resulted in 
a much smoother frequency responce than any but the most 
perfect metallic diaphragms.
     Initially, E-V used this material in versions of their 
existing microphones but the advent of economically formable 
Alnico magnets and efficient pole material led one of there 
designers, Alpha Wiggins, to develop a new design which came 
out about 1950. This was sold as the Model 655, a high 
output non-directional microphone aimed right at the 
broadcast industry. It also had some other design 
innovations which allowed it to have a very smooth, 
extended, frequency responce (40hz to 15,000hz) and a quite 
uniform directional pattern. It was an immediate hit. It was 
very light weight and cost about half what other similar 
microphones with broadcast quality did.
     About two years later the same design team found a new 
principle for obtaining a cardioid pattern, they called it 
"Variable-D". This method allowed the use of conventional 
moving coil elements, which are acoustically _resistance 
controlled_. Without going into this the advantage is that 
the element is relatively insensitive to mechanical shock 
and rumble pickup and to wind flutter. The principle also 
eliminates to a great extent the "proximity effect" so 
familiar to users of bi-directional and cardioid ribbon 
mics, an effect that results in an accentuation of bass when 
used close. Both of these made the new microphone especially 
useful for close talking purposes although its frequency 
charactristic was also good at a distance. The new 
microphone also employed Acoustaloy and the new magnetic 
materials. The first one was released as the Model 666 and 
very quickly displaced RCA and other microphones from all 
broadcast use especially television. Again, they were 
relativly small, light in weight, very rugged, and had high 
output, plus having excellent directional discrimination.
     The 666 was intended for the broadcasting and recording 
industry so E-V made two less expensive models with somewhat 
more restricted frequency response, the 665 and the 664, the 
latter aimed mostly at the public address market. While the 
666 ahd 665 came in non-reflective gray paint for television 
use the 664 was finished in bright chrome for P.A. and 
similar use. Not long after it came out Collins began to 
feature it in their advertising, especially for the Gold 
Dust Twins and to recommend it generally for ham phone use.
     When the 666 came out Lou Buroughs, who was then the 
sales manager of E-V stressed the ruggednes of the mic by 
hammering nails with them in sales demonstrations. Remember, 
that most brodcasters were used to RCA and Western-Electric 
(later Altec-Lansing) microphones which were quite delicate, 
so the demonstration was impressive. This led to the nick 
name Buchanan Hammer (after Buchanan Michigan, where E-V was 
headquartered). I think it was Bill Cara, who was sales 
manager for Shure Brothers, who began to tell customers that 
if they bought a Shure mic he would give them a hammer.
     At any rate, they are excellent mics.
     Now, I _have_ had problems in a couple of ancient E-V 
mics with wiring but I have no idea of their history. One 
was a Model 635 (not the later 635-A) which had intermittant 
connections in the flex between the head and body, and the 
other was a lavalier mic where the leads from the voice coil 
across the diaphragm had corroded to non-existance. I 
suspect both problems are unusual.
     The D-104 has a rising characteristic between about 
300hz and about 4khz, about right for increasing 
intelligibility of speech in the presense of noise. It is 
pretty smooth so doesn't sound too metallic but will sound 
very bright in comparison to a 664 on a wide-range system. 
The difference may be less obvious where the relatively 
narrow filters used for SSB are used but the rise is right 
in the range the filters pass. The output of the D-104 is 
also exceptionallly high, even without the internal 
amplifier found on latter ones. Perhaps  10db more than a 
664 or similar moving coil mic. This may or may not be of 
importance depending on the available gain of the particular 
transmitter.


--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles
WB6KBL
dickburk at ix.netcom.com