A special guest for the Astatic 77

One of the things that immediately came to mind when I decided to create a blog which featured my vintage microphones, was to have some friends over to sing and record them using my mics. I thought it would be nice for people to listen to the sound the microphones provided, along with some entertainment offered by the guests. While I’m still trying to get some friends who have groups and CDs of their own, I had my niece, Aline, over for a test run on how I would do this. What I thought would be an easy task, turned out to be a bit more complicated. Since I was recording video with my digital camera, and audio that came from the mic on my notebook, I would have to sync them both together later on. That was the real challenge. I did it with one song, and it worked out fine. But I realized it’s too much work. Since she’s coming over again next week, next time I’ll connect the audio from the mic directly to a video camera.

Aline has been singing for two years now, and has been on a rock/alternative/indie band for just about the same time. She just got over a cold, so to her benefit, it wasn’t her best performance. We tried 4 or 5 microphones, but for now, I’m just posting a small taste of That Thing You Do!.
 

 

 

 

As for the mic, the Astatic 77 is definitely a really nice looking microphone. In the 40’s, Shure hit the jackpot in terms of microphone design, when they came up with the 55 line. It only got better when, in 1951, the slim version (55S) was created. The fact that to this day it’s still manufactured, says something. In my opinion, a lot of the other companies wanted to resemble the look, in order to compete in sales. Although it’s similar in shape, the Astatic 77 went beyond that. Astatic came out with a beautiful design of its own, and the proof to that are other later models (from Claricon, Lafayette, Calrad, Calectro, etc.) that tried to approximate the 77 design. Like the old Shure 55 models, the Astatic 77 also has a high/medium/low switch, but located on the bottom front.
 

 

 

 

 

  

  

A curious fact is that a lot people make the mistake of calling it Astatic 77A, because of the “A” (Astatic) logo next to the “77”. The DS rarity scale: 8.3/10.