Review: Electro-Voice RE320

My first real experience with the Electro-Voice RE20 was way back in the late ’70s when I toured with Blood Sweat & Tears and used it on kick drum. Back then it was the mic of choice for bass drum – it was always on my production rider – and these days I own two of them. They’re still in production today, of course, and EV must have sold countless thousands of them over the decades. Now the 320 has arrived, building on its parent’s reputation as a genuine classic.

The original RE20 is a bit of an icon as far as dynamic mics are concerned. In particular, the mic has become synonymous with voiceover work and radio DJ’ing, so much so that it’s prominent on at least two TV shows that include a radio station in the story line. There’s a good reason for this, of course: it may well be the most commonly used announcer mic in radio stations the world over – it’s looks, sound and shape are now literally inseparable from the role it seems! Here in Australia the RE20 sits pride of place at 2CH, MMM, 2DayFM and countless others.

AN ICON RE-BORN

The Electro-Voice RE20 and RE320 are the biggest large-diaphragm dynamic mics money can buy, the RE320 being the newest generation of voiceover classic made by the longstanding US manufacturer. It’s a little lighter, shorter and brighter than the RE20, and owing to its neodymium magnet, puts out a little more signal (a whopping 1mV/Pascal). It’s also black nowadays and comes with a switch on the body that tailors the frequency response of the microphone specifically for kick drums by giving it a considerable (if you’ll pardon the pun) kick in the bottom-end response. For so many years the RE20 has been used to mic up kick drums even though I’m pretty sure EV never anticipated its use in this role – now the new Chinese manufactured RE320 caters to the bass drum specifically.

Essentially flat from 100Hz to 4kHz, with a little dip at 4.2k rising +4dB at 5k, dipping down again at 7.2k and then rising again at 10k, the unadjusted frequency response of the RE320 is primarily tailored for voice pickup. When the ‘kick switch’ is engaged a different response curve is applied, which sees a rise at 125Hz, a dip of 4.5dB at 380Hz (à la your average engineer’s kick drum EQ low-end shaping) with additional peaks at 2.8, 4.2 and 7.2kHz. This ‘kick switch’ effectively gives you two mics for the price of one (although it can’t be in two places at once for obvious reasons). The polar response is also very even up to around 8k, which is very handy when you have less than ideal mic technique.

THE VARIABLE-D

Electro-Voice secured patents for ‘Variable-D’ technology way back in 1963 when it first introduced a range of mics featuring the technology and trademarked the name. Other mics in the range back then also included the RE664, the RE16 (hyper-cardioid dynamic), the RE15 (cardioid dynamic) and a couple of cheaper cousins (the RE10 and RE11). But the flagship model that has sustained throughout the years was the RE20, followed on years later by the RE27ND.

So what is ‘Variable-D’ exactly? Basically, by careful design of the rear entry ports on the body of the mic, EV was able to greatly reduce proximity effect common to directional microphones and provide a balanced and uniform frequency response up to 180° off-axis. This impressive capacity not only made the RE20 great for voiceover work, where DJs tended to move around a bit, in a rock ‘n’ roll setting where vocals were recorded live in a room full of loud instruments, the resulting off-axis spill into the vocal mic sounded natural, not horrible.