Say „Shure" and you think the SM58 — a microphone silhouette recognizable even to people who've never set foot on a stage. The company was founded in 1925 in Chicago by Sidney N. Shure, and its first business had nothing to do with microphones at all — it started out selling do-it-yourself radio kits. The turning point came in 1937, when a young engineer named Ben Bauer (born Baumzweiger, a refugee from revolutionary Russia) set out to solve a problem with the directional microphones of the day — built from two separate capsules, which made them bulky, heavy, and poor-sounding. Bauer figured out how to achieve a cardioid pattern from a single diaphragm, creating what became known as Unidyne technology. The result was the legendary Model 55 of 1939 — a microphone styled with Art Deco flair, inspired in part by the grille of a 1937 Oldsmobile, later immortalized on stage by Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and Billie Holiday, and at the podium by JFK and Martin Luther King during his „I Have a Dream" speech.

The next breakthrough came in 1959 with the Unidyne III capsule, designed by engineer Ernie Seeler — interestingly, with television and broadcast in mind rather than rock, a genre Seeler himself wasn't even a fan of. That very design, after years of testing that included dropping, throwing, cooking, and submerging it in salt water, became the basis for the two most recognizable microphones in the world: the SM57 (1965) and the SM58 (1966). Their remarkable mechanical toughness made them a live-sound standard across every genre, one that hasn't gone away since.

At Wired Tunes we carry the full Shure product range — from the classic SM57 and SM58, to the KSM series of condenser microphones, to advanced wireless systems and in-ear monitors for musicians. It's gear for anyone who cares more about reliability on stage than numbers on a spec sheet — a microphone that survives a fall off a stand just as well as it's survived the test of time.