NAB 2024: Shure Talks New MoveMic, SLX-D Portable and More

Shure's Russ Shelfman discusses new audio production developments from Shure including the new MoveMic, SLX-D Portable mic, the MV7+ radio and podcast mic, and more in this interview with Streaming Media's Marc Franklin from the Shure booth at NAB 2024.

Marc Franklin: We're here at Shure's NAB 2024 booth and Sales Development Specialist Russ Helfman is going to take us through some of the new audio developments that Shure has for us this year. We're going to be focusing on their wireless products and they go the gambit from the starter wireless system on up to some real high-quality broadcast ones. So why don't you take us through it?

Russ Helfman: Sure. So we are excited to announce MoveMic. MoveMic is our two-channel direct-to-phone wireless microphone system. So these are the transmitters right here. You can see they're very, very small. They have an eight-hour battery life. They're connecting via Bluetooth to your phone. However, we are using our own proprietary software, which is going to get you wider frequency response and two discrete channels directly into a mobile device. So you have a total of 24 hours' battery life, that's eight hours for each transmitter plus the charging case as well. This comes in three different configurations, so you can have the single-channel unit, which is just going to be the one transmitter just like this. You're still going to get the dual charging case right that way down the road if you wanted to purchase the second transmitter separately. You can always add that in. However, if you wanted to do that right away, you can get the two-channel just like this. And the third option is going to be with an actual camera receiver. So this can actually connect to any camera that you like. It also has USB-C, so you can connect this directly to a computer and it can act as a two channel audio interface. Very excited to be announcing those products.

Marc Franklin: Now when you use that as an audio interface, can it be powered from the computer?

Russ Helfman: It can. However, it does have its own built-in battery.

Marc Franklin: What's the other new wireless device you have?

Russ Helfman: So the next wireless is going to be our SLX-D portables, which is what you're hearing right now. We are announcing the SLX-D 5-camera mount receiver. So this is UHF. A big feature on this one is multi mic mode. So what you can do with multi mic mode is normally with wireless systems when you're setting them up, you're going to do your frequency scan on the receiver and then you sync with your transmitter and do another scan. You just work your way down the line. So what multi mic mode allows you to do is scan, deploy and monitor all of your SLX-D portable receivers from one. So it's very, very convenient. You can monitor everything no matter where you are on set. So this is the SLX-D 5 receiver. We're also releasing the SLX-D 3 plug-on transmitter. So this we actually ported our patented locking mechanism down from our Axient Digital.

So it's a very, very robust connection. You're not going to have to worry about your microphone detaching accidentally or falling or dropping or anything like that. These can be powered over USB-C or AA battery or our SB903 rechargeable battery. I should mention if you are using the SB903 battery on the screen, you'll see your battery life in hours and minutes. Same thing on the receiver, but on the receiver screen you're actually going to see the battery life for the receiver and the transmitter is very cool. 12 or 48 volt fan power on this and all metal construction. It's built really, really well.

Marc Franklin: Will it give you a battery readout for using AAs?

Russ Helfman: It does, yes. It'll kind of looks like a cell phone. You will will still be able to monitor your battery life.

Marc Franklin: Is there also a dual receiver?

Russ Helfman: Not at this time. It's a single channel.

Marc Franklin: It's diversity. That's why that's two.

Russ Helfman: Yep. It is true diversity with our predictive technology in there. So it will switch antennas before it actually interviews.

Marc Franklin: This looks like it'll be a really great product. And we're going to go on and look at a couple other things here at the Shure booth. Now in the sound booth in the Shure booth, we are going to look at the new MD7+, which can be used for podcasting radio voiceover. It's based on one of their previous models, but it has a lot of new features. So I'm going to let Russ take us through this one.

Russ Helfman: Sure. So this is the MV7+ microphone that just came out a couple of weeks ago. So there's been a few notable changes, improvements, and upgrades. So first thing is we have gone from micro USB to USB-C. We still have the XLR and XLR and USB can be used at the same time and go to two different devices. A lot of gamers like to do that. You have a headphone jack for monitoring and you see we do have the white color as well as black. The largest upgrade here is going to be our new touchscreen here. This has 16.8 million colors that you can control from our new MOTIV mix app, which I'll show you in just a moment. But you can change the colors to match your branding if you like or just put your favorite color on there. It is also anywhere you touch, you can mute the microphone.

You can set this to either go in a pulse mode, you can set it to go with your audio levels or you can have it just be just a black color if you like. Another thing that we changed here is we've added a longer pop screen. So there's a little bit of an air gap between the capsule and the foam here to reduce plosives. We've also added within the software a digital Popper Stopper. So plosives on this microphone are pretty much not a thing anymore. Now moving on to MOTIV Mix. MOTIV Mix is our new desktop software that controls all of the DSP within the microphone. So what you can do with the software is you can bring in all of your audio sources. So if you have multiple USB microphones, you have up to eight audio sources that can come in here. You could bring in Teams sound, Zoom call, the other side, music, any audio source you have on your computer you can bring in here and control.

This is where we're going to control all of our DSP for the MV7+. So on here we can do an auto level. So the microphone will actually set the level for you. You can monitor your microphone level in relation to your system sounds. You have have tone controls here for dark, natural, and bright. You've got three different types of reverb. We have a hall a plate and a studio reverb that are all variable. So you can put as much on there as you like. Real-time Denoiser, Popper Stopper, as I had mentioned earlier, high-pass filter, you can control your LEDs. Again, it's 16.8 million colors that you have on there.

And we have two really cool features also built into the software. So the first one is called soundcheck, and what that's going to do is it's going to take all of your audio inputs. You do a really quick recording for a couple of seconds just so the software can hear how loud your voice is and then it's going to make recommendations for you and tell you how much you should either raise or lower your gain based on what it's seeing or it'll tell you that it's just fun. So once that's done, all your levels are good to go here. If we wanted to record, we just hit the record button, you get a little countdown and once your recording is finished, it's going to save right to your computer and it's multi-track recording. So you'll have each one of your individual inputs on a separate file as well as a mixed output.

So you've got a lot of control. If you want it to do some extra editing in your DAW, you can do all of that separately. And for owners of the previous version of the MV7 MOTIVMix is compatible. So you will be able to access the DSP that the MV7 is capable of doing through the Motive Mix software. And it is also compatible with the MVX2U interface and MV88+ stereo microphone. So that is the MOTIV Mix software and MV7+ microphone.