Bosch Communications Systems

The Electro-Voice PL80a dynamic vocal microphone is a fantastic sounding mic that delivers world-class performance at a price that every musician can afford. We began testing the mic before we had any idea of its price, and almost everyone who spent time using it thought it was a much pricier microphone. The PL80a has a bright top end that let vocals cut through mixes beautifully, and its output is extremely hot, making it easy to get strong signal levels without pushing your PA system to the edge of feedback.

Most musicians sing through an industry standard Shure SM-58 either because of its price, because everyone else uses it, or because it’s like a comfort food: You’re familiar with it, you’ve used it for years, and you don’t see a reason to check anything else out. But the PL80a is proof that you owe it to yourself to consider some alternatives. For the same street price as your old standard, you’ll experience a new mic that may sound significantly better with your voice, and the PL80a easily rivals mics that sell for double its cost.

The PL80a is a dynamic microphone designed for live performance use. It has a modern look with its textured black satin exterior and grey windscreen.The mic’s frequency response goes from 80 Hz — 16 kHz, impedance is 600 ohms, and it has a super-cardioid polar pattern. As its price puts this mic in direct competition with the ubiquitous Shure SM-58, it is important to point out that the PL80a has significantly different specs than the SM-58 (and thus it sounds quite a bit different):

• The SM-58 is a cardioid microphone with a 50 Hz — 15 kHz frequency response and 300 ohms impedance. So to start, the SM-58 reproduces lower frequencies but slightly less high end than the PL80a.
• The different polar pattern contributes to different performance characteristics, too. A cardioid pattern (like that in the SM-58) primarily picks up sound within a 130-degree angle in front of the microphone, has reduced sensitivity to sounds coming from outside that range, and rejects almost all audio directly behind the mic.
• A super-cardioid pattern (such as found on the PL80a) picks up sound within a narrower 115-degree angle in front of the mic, and has almost no sensitivity to sounds beyond 120-degrees off-axis on either side. However, super-cardioid mics traditionally pick up a narrow range of audio hitting it from directly behind the mic.

Electro-Voice claims “incredible vocal power and clarity” for this mic, and although we’ll talk about clarity in the Sound section of our review, we can definitely attest to the power claim, no doubt in part to the use of a neo-dymium magnet in the capsule. Plugging this mic into our PA system in place of an SM-58 necessitated reducing the input trim on our mixing board — it was downright hot by comparison.