Sometimes it's hard to tell, but on my first listen it seemed that the 57 was much warmer and fuller.

But if it encourages people to buy a 57, my warning about fakes needs to be made a faq.

I have been there - bought a fake 57 (got refunded, luckily) and bought a genuine one. You can check by seeing if the head rotates freely on the body, but they change the superficial things every 6 months, so they may have dealt with that one already. The fake wasn't correctly insulated, so that you heard a lot of electrical noise if you touched it.

There are many videos on how to spot fakes on Youtube (I watched these two six years ago, but they rapidly become obsolete, as the fakers get more sophisticated, as one of the videos points out: - ): my advice is to be cautious and just use the videos for education - don't buy willy nilly on the assumption that you are too well informed to get stung. And since the RRP has come down, you don't even save much money on EBay.

JohnG said
@Gordon Shumway - Thanks for that info. The one I got was through Amazon from a company called Alto Music at the recently reduced price of $89. Alto is a dealer from Middletown, NY. Good to know about the fakes, though and one of the reasons I avoid e-bay whenever possible. 

  

But there's a further caveat - some dealers, even high-end ones, get their stock from EBay, and I've known people buy fake violin strings from shops that way.

The Shure website lists their recommended dealers.