Polar response is the measurement of a microphone’s sensitivity to a given frequency relative to angle of incidence. Ribbons naturally exhibit a bidirectional, or figure-of-8 polar response because both sides of the transducer are equally exposed to incoming sound pressure waves. This means the microphone exhibits equal sensitivity to sounds arriving at the front as
Thelonious Monk was once heard to remark “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” His point was that music is a transcendent medium that is simply meant to be listened to, felt, and enjoyed rather than deconstructed, critiqued, and reduced to mere academics. His well-informed sentiment notwithstanding, audio engineers often communicate abstract ideas about
Ribbon mics operate on the same electromagnetic principle as their distant relatives ‘dynamic mics’ but with one important difference: Instead of the dynamic’s cumbersome plastic voice coil (Fig. 1), the ribbon mic employs an extremely thin strip of corrugated aluminum (Fig. 1.3) suspended in a strong magnetic field. Due to its extremely low mass, the
Condenser mics are a little more complicated – we’ll try to provide a very simple explanation! The condenser employs a capsule (Fig. 1.2) consisting of a solid metallic disc called the backplate and, on one or both sides of the backplate, a very thin conductive plate called a membrane. The membrane, usually gold-sputtered Mylar, moves
Of all modern microphone designs, dynamics are the simplest. They operate on the principle of electromagnetic induction, meaning the physical motion of components within the mic actually generates its output current by moving a suspended coil of conductive wire, the voice coil (Fig. 1), through a magnetic field. When the incoming sound pressure wave displaces
Meet the transducer: a device that converts one form of energy into another corresponding form of energy for some useful purpose. Microphones are specialized transducers that convert acoustic energy (known as sound pressure) into electrical current for amplification, broadcast, or recording. Microphones have been around since the 1870’s when telephone engineers needed a way to
Let’s say you’re a guitarist. You’ve spent tons of money on guitars, amps, effects, and mods; and years experimenting and listening to find your sound. It sounds amazing standing in front of your amp, right? So why is it so painful to walk into the control room after a take only to hear something that’s
Gayle Levant is the leading harpist in Los Angeles. She has played on countless movie scores and has recorded with some of the biggest names in music including Ray Charles, Barbara Streisand, and Frank Sinatra. The first time she heard her harp recorded with ribbons was when she was doing us a favor recording a
We’ve been saying this since we opened our doors in 1998, and we’d like to take a minute to explain what we mean. Simply put, when you put a quality ribbon mic on an instrument, voice, or other sound source, what you hear on playback is closer to real sound in nature than with any