Steinberg: Technology always changes, except the Shure Model 55

Follow @neilsteinbergOf course it stands out.

In an era when hi-tech design means some version of the Apple lozenge, all brushed steel and rounded corners, how could you fail to admire an example of 2016 technology that owes its look to the chrome grille of a 1937 Oldsmobile?

The Shure Unidyne Model 55 Dynamic Microphone debuted in 1939 and has been in production ever since, more or less unchanged. A few tweaks: the quarter-sized diaphram inside, glued to a coil of wire that turns sound vibrations into electrical impulses, went from aluminum to Mylar. The inner windscreen, once cloth, is now foam.

The company that sells them, Shure Incorporated, started in Chicago in 1925 and has staked out an enviable position both revering its past and working at future innovation, or so it seemed to me when I toured its Niles headquarters.

I assumed the Helmut Jahn building was designed for Shure, since its decorative screening so boldly evokes a microphone. Actually, it was built for Ha-Lo Industries.

“They went bankrupt building the building,” said Michael Pettersen, director of corporate history, overlooking a few other factors, like Ha-Lo’s disastrous purchase of Starbelly.

Follow @neilsteinberg

But some poetic latitude must be permitted, considering the second title on Pettersen’s business card is “Sage” and that he will, on Monday, have 40 years at Shure, meaning he is the 12th most senior of … well, the privately held firm doesn’t say how many employees it has. Whatever the number, they are treated well, working in a gorgeous, airy building enjoying perks not found at many places of business: an expanse of prairie to relax in and a memorial garden with markers commemorating longtime employees now deceased.

Shure not only has a full-time historian, but an archivist, too, busily filing corporate minutia into gray archival boxes.

The lobby features a museum dedicated to founder S.N. Shure, beginning as a Chicago kid building radios, entering the radio parts wholesale business, coming upon a moribund microphone manufacturer and leaping into production. As well as the products Shure developed, such as record stylus cartridges. In 1958, when Columbia introduced stereo records, it worked in secret with Shure since the stereo LPs would do no good unless they had the proper stereo cartridges to play them.

Pettersen pointed out how microphone design reflected and influence performance styles: about all a singer could do was stand in front of the bricklike Model 55 and croon. By the 1950s, however, performers wanted to move, and Shure’s slimmer microphones permitted that. The company also did pioneering work on wireless microphones. In 1953, Shure began manufacturing its Vagabond wireless system. Cardinal Samuel Stritch ordered one for the Chicago Archdiocese. Half of all professional microphones are now wireless.

The two functions I saw were testing and research. Microphones get a lot of hard use. They are dropped, crushed, sweated upon — hence the bottles of “Artificial Perspiration” and ovens and freezers to bake and chill mics. The headquarters has large chambers that are not only acoustically dead — with yard-thick wedges of fiberglas to kill echoes and exterior noise — but lined with ferrite to screen out radio waves.

Having admired their oldest products, I asked to try their newest: the $3,000 KSE-1500, introduced earlier this year, a pair of advanced ear buds that basically reproduce a high-end speaker inside your ear. It was astounding; a tiny John Coltrane slumped on a stool in the middle of my head and blew “Blue Train” on his tiny sax. I considered suggesting I needed to hold onto them for a few weeks in order to properly investigate their qualities, but that was a lie, so, with great reluctance, I popped them out and handed them back.

Shure has a full-size professional recording studio and a 130-seat theater. Those in the microphone industry tend to also be musicians, and Shure has dozens of employee musical groups.

As I peered into the theater I ran into Skylar Grey, the Wisconsin musician who wrote hits for Eminem, Rihanna and Dr. Dre and was in town for a concert, also touring Shure headquarters with her entourage.

“I’m a fan,” she said. I told her that, as a non-musician, I wouldn’t think the brand of microphone would matter much.

“It totally matters,” the singer said.

Tweets by @neilsteinberg