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Old 05-11-2014, 08:57 PM
Fran Guidry Fran Guidry is offline
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Location: Walnut Creek, CA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Luke_ View Post
Maybe a dumb question but why is one side of the mic crisp and the other boomy. It's like it has a bass and a treble side?

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Try to find a polar diagram for your mic. You're experiencing the cardioid polar pattern at work.

If you use a 1 khz test tone you'll find that one side of the mic picks up a lot more signal than the other. But listening to broad band sound you hear more bass from the back side because it's harder to reduce low frequencies and because those frequencies are less directional and less likely to be attenuated by their trip through the air.

It's common to think that a mic is like a flashlight, so you point it at the source you want to capture. But to some extent every mic is omni-directional. Directional mics are just less sensitive in some directions than others, and this variation in sensitivity varies with the frequency.

So one characteristic that makes them some mics very desirable is a very even attenuation of off-axis sounds. This usually makes a mic very expensive as well.

Fran
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