Microphones are a tiny slice of Sony’s sprawling electronics business, but the slice they make is serious. Sony’s lavalier mics show up on TV news desks, their broadcast wireless on professional sports trucks, and their newer ECM-B10 shotgun mounts on countless mirrorless cameras.
Sony’s pro audio division is in Atsugi, Japan, and it makes microphones aimed mostly at television, film, and large-event broadcast — not the home studio. The ECM (Electret Condenser Microphone) family of lavaliers is what most people have heard, even if they don’t know they’ve heard it.
For higher-end studio work, Sony made the legendary C-37A in the 1950s — a tube condenser that sat next to a Neumann U47 in many studios — and revived the line decades later with the C-800G, a wildly expensive tube mic that hip-hop vocalists adopted as a status symbol.