Depending on the type of microphone you’re building or buying, you might need some detailed technical information that’s specific to that type of microphone. That’s the focus of most of the other categories on this blog.
However, there are some microphone basics that are useful to know regardless of the specific type of microphone you might want to build or buy. These include:
The post provides an overview of Electret Condenser Microphones (ECMs) and describes practical ways of using them to drive standard microphone inputs. What are Electret Condenser Microphones? Condenser is an archaic term for capacitor. A…
What’s the best microphone element for your DIY microphone? Read on for a list of my favorite elements for various DIY microphone applications. The microphone elements NOT on my list I don’t build microphones as…
This post is about microphone back-end design: it shows how a microphone’s interoperability requirements—which specify which types of devices it must work with—drive key aspects of its design. The microphone back-end In Part 1 of…
This post is about microphone front-end design: it shows how a microphone’s performance requirements drive key aspects of its design. The microphone front-end In Part 1 of this series (Basic DIY microphone design—Part 1: the…
This post describes the overall microphone design process: how to translate microphone requirements into a basic DIY microphone design. Parts 2 and 3 of this series will delve deeper into key aspects of the design…
Unfortunately, the internet doesn’t provide detailed info on predicting microphone range in any one place…until now. This post describes methods to predict a microphone’s pick-up range as a function of its key performance attributes and…
In Part 1 of this post, I introduced the Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR), explained why it’s the key microphone performance metric, and described how to calculate it. In this Part 2, I’ll discuss three ways of…
What is microphone SINR and how do you calculate it? Designing—and properly using—a microphone often calls for a way to predict microphone performance. This post introduces the most useful metric for that purpose: the Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise…
Many audio inputs supply microphone Plug-In Power (PiP), which is an extremely convenient way to supply power to microphones that use Electret Condenser Microphone (ECM) elements. However, performance will suffer if the PiP supply isn’t…
A microphone’s performance in any given application will be determined mostly by just four key microphone specifications. In this post I’ll explain what they are, why they’re important, and how to choose them for a…