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I love any video with Doug in it, he just makes complex explanations so easy to understand, along with a sense of humour :)

I love Doug. He's always so informative and easy to understand.

Hey you old convict, we're using metric over here in the old country except for cricket and horse racing. Loved the video, please do more Dave.

I absolutely love these types of videos that teach me how things work and about the design.

One of the legendary episodes of EEVblog.

Always a pleasure to see Doug on the channel.

Cool stuff, when i was a technican in a audio recording studio a came across lots of miks. The ones that impressed me the most where the sennheiser MKH types. As they used RF modulation, like the theremin, to "recreate" the audio. The "inventor" of the condenser mike was the "Neumann" company as they´ve done the first good working condenser mike ("The Bottle"), while the ribbon technique was first introduced by UK and US based companies (Royer, BBC and RCA)

The High energy multimeter destruction video kicked ass... Nice to have Doug back on the stage :-)

Excellent documentary on microphones Dave & Mate who doing all work,thank's.

*Despite what I already know, your Fundamental Fridays teach me much more. A suggestion for a future FF episode: various oscillator circuits and how they work.*

I do live event audio engineering. Found this set of videos very helpful. There is a reason the SM58 is a staple of live sound vocal microphones. Well done.

Nice - wasn't expecting this, this morning & just in time for coffee - nice job guys, You're a ledgebag for setting this up Dave, good to see some more audio stuff!

Carbon granule microphones are still produced and used in the last bastion of archaic audio technology: Harmonica Amplification The abysmal frequency response and overall "lo-fi" sound is sometimes desirable when close mic'ing a source that could otherwise sound overly bright and harsh, like a harmonica. Same thing goes for diaphragm coupled "crystal" piezo microphones.

Very informative video--looking forward to the next ones.

I like it when there's a guest in the lab, Good talk.

Thanks guys.That was amazing and helpful. I'm a 59 yr old Bass player and I've bought some equipment to record some original music as well as some of my old band mates music because I want to leave some documents behind when I buy the farm and take a dirt nap lmao.Seriously,I'm in bad health and wake up in the hospital once or twice a year with tubes coming outta every orifice in my body,not cancer or anything,but I'm trying to learn how mics work and you guys tell it like it is and I'm gonna watch every f#$%ing video in this series.Ty

These are incredible videos Dave, thanks for posting this ! Now I wanna tear apart all of my microphones

Thanks Dave for this very interesting lesson I look forward to more with Mr. Ford. As always your efforts are both educational AND entertaining.!

As a hobbyist audio engineer, i find this very interesting! thank you!

Please invite a guest like this for fundamentals Friday at least once in two months, IT WAS AWESOME.

RU-vid have changed the comment system again.....(end of 08 2017). Watching this series again, this is pure gold. If only we had more.....

Great video. There is a microphone that does sense sound that doesn't use 'Wobbly Diaphragm' it uses two heated wire filaments and the oscillations in the air causes the wires to cool and the resistance changes. I think the company is Microflown that make them in case anyone is interested.

i love the way you people enjoy sharing information

My brother is a former broadcaster and still a musician. He will love this video.

the major reason recording engineers and musos like ribbon mics is the polar pattern. they usually capture the sound of drums, guitars and what have you much better, or at least capture the preferred sound by most ears. condensers are great otherwise if the acoustics of the environment sound ok. alternatively if you want to imprint very noticeable characteristics on the recording, differentiate it sonically from other things or capture a dry sound and not so much background, dynamic mics are preferred.

Some people often ask why microphones don't simply mimic human hearing by measuring frequencies separately. In the human ear, there's a couple thousand neuron receptor cells that each respond to a different frequency. If it works for us, why dick around with measuring wobbly membranes? It's interesting to consider that mammalian ears (including human ears) measure frequency and not time. This might seem like a pretty silly thing to do, because it takes a lot of effort to construct (biological) band-pass filters that are going to be accurate enough for musical hearing (cochlear implant designers had to learn this the hard way). Though thinking about the limitations of biology, it makes sense why hearing is based on frequency and not time. If you measure frequency separately, you can equalize by simple changing the gain of each frequency channel (biological gain), instead of having to do weird FFT or AC coupling mechanisms, which might as well be impossible in biology. This biological equalization happens all day long. If you endure a specific tone for some time, you'll be desensitized to it. If you want to construct an electric variant of the ear.. you'd need some way to construct tens of thousands of little band-pass filters that are accurate to single hertz. Anyone knows if this is currently possible at all? So, in a way, biological hearing is better as frequency-based, while electronic sound capture is best as time-based (currently)

Love this guy!

After working Doug at Jands and post era discussions, we all have afirmed the opinion that doug names his electrons and has successfully farmed them.

Great video Dave, keep them coming! Hope you have now learned a bit more about sound, acoustics and audio... and how it hooks together with electronics... pretty much same with preamplifies, amplifiers, speakers, etc... all have their distinctive sound depending on how they are mechanically and electrically constructed, topology, quality and material of parts, etc...

Thank you for this! looking forward to the rest of the series!

At 2:06 the gentleman refers to an Italian engineer who developed the telephone before Alexander Graham Bell. His name was Alessandro Meucci.

Thanks for showing. A microphone is definitely a physics project, let alone the electronic amplification efforts!

Excellent. Definitely looking forward to the rest of these.

Great Video Dave! FYI in America we use feet in the construction field and meters in the lab. Mainly because old people are too stubborn to change.

Didn't know Rode was an Australian company. The last time I saw Rode microphones was when I was in a vocational skills competition, and they had a video news production competition in which the boom microphones used were twice as expensive as the cameras themselve

Yay Douglas is back

This guy is marvelous I love good analog design but my favorite was his referring to a tube as a Fet with a pilot light ! Beauty his last design would make a great phono preamp plenty of gain for required RIAA equalization and still very quite

Can't wait for more microphones videos!

also have a look at the Heil Sound web site for a great explanation of microphones and also how we hear. The fletcher munson curve explaines how we actually hear through our ears.

brilliant. I look forward to more audio-related vids!

I like this discussion like format... more guests like this! :)

awesome! Love the channel, any more content on audio/audio electronics/processors is more than welcome!

Can you do a video on audio basics? Sine wave, oscillascope, Nyquist, resistance, Ohms, all that stuff. I've seen a video on this kind of stuff but the one I saw assumed I was taking a class in audio engineering already or something, it lectured in Greek to me.

Can't wait for the next part!

Cant wait for part 2!

Microphones can be pretty surprising actually, for example you can use a piezo as a microphone for guitars, as an extremely precise touch sensor or as a damn loud tweeter. A very smart use of speakers is when intercoms use the speaker as both a microphone and a speaker. (Electra intercoms in Romania are made like that, in a very old model you can actually short circuit the ground with the speaker to hear the speaker at the entrance without anyone calling)

Hi Dave! Love your channel mate! I learn so much from them and I enjoy the way you explain things. I can’t seem to find all the videos from the microphone series though :-/ is there a complete playlist somewhere online? Thanks in advance!

One thing I've learned is to NEVER remove that paper/cloth tape that covers the vents on a dynamic microphone element, it sounds crappy if you do that.

Why do we design audio systems based around the eardrum. Has there ever been a microphone that acts like the cochlear with its multiple simultaneous frequency receptors?

Really enjoyed that Dave! keep 'em coming!

The eevblog never fails to impress.

Fantastic, I have wonted information on microphones for a long time.

Thank you Doug for all the info.. you are the man!

If it works as a mic it will generally work as a speaker....Take a look at the Apogee loudspeakers, they are a sight to behold. I was running a service dept. in a high end hi fi shop in the 90s when these arrived and a pair were in for service. A curious colleague was looking at one and had an allen key in his hand...As I watched I was too slow to react as he moved the allen key toward the ribbon...The massive magnetic field caught hold and whipped the key from his hand..and PLONK..stuck itself to the ribbon! Microphone technology and outstanding quality recording technique and microgroove arrived together in the early 50s allowing us to hear close miked crooners on all their glory for the first time...Listen to Buddy Holly...Never been surpassed for quality, and it is obvious.

Those of us doing the math for calculating speed of sound are capable of converting imperial to metric in our heads (or thinking in metric to start with, but that is still rare, even in younger users). There is really no need for using feet for anyone using these maths. Most often, it is an off-the-cuff measurement by sight for calculating things like PA system delay, or using fixed-length things like floor tiles for calculating the expected resonant frequencies of a room.

really interesting video, thanks a lot, especially to doug for sharing his knowledge :)

I'm not really "into" microphone tech, but this video was surprisingly interesting. Nice one!

Very interesting and unique Dave, Thanks!

Hi Dave, can you guys talk a little bit about how bone conduction headphones work, limitations, etc? Things like Google Glasses uses them and I'm sure more future devices like that will use these.

Excellent. Adore this channel!

It was my father who created the radio quality headset for telephones and gave it to AT&T/Bell

Had no idea Rode was an Australian company! Love this featured video

27:34 should have been the cover picture. I had never converted speed of sound to ft/s always have used m/s even though I am a Yank, but it is interesting to know that sound travels the distance of almost 4 football fields per second.

Great video! I'd like to hear a little more about how the condenser mic is measuring capacitance. Why does it need +48v at the mic, etc.

Really excellent and fun to absorb.

17:35 : Why small capsule condenser mics have a stronger low-end freq response than a large capsule.

It's a very interesting 'lecture', thanks!

well that was pleasantly different, thanks guys - great talk :)

Oooooooooooooooooo Rode, Dug worked at rode? I love Rode mics. My fave though is the NT1-A. I'd love a stereo pair of those. Though it looks like they don't do that no more.

lol I didn't realize you guys were sitting til I saw this ep.

Premium, industrial grade, AAA rated content right there. Wow. Loved it

A lot of USA military radios and communication equipment still use carbon microphones. Very robust.

Brilliant episode, very informative!

Doug's a cool guy. I'd sure like to hear him explain how a single tube shotgun mic works!

yo talking about soildering,where did you buy yours, the yellow one? is it good to buy it on ebay?

Could you at some point do a "Cheap lab power supply" shootout like you did with the multimeters? I need buying advice :]

Please show more things like this!

Very Good Video. I've been watching your videos for quite a while now Dave ! And im an Actual Musician. I found this Video very useful as its seen from a Designers perspective (on top of that from a very well respected company in the music industry) and its thoroughly explained :) Keep up the good work ! greetings Chris

Many thanks for these!

A somewhat recent issue of QST had a ribbon microphone construction project.

To me, you demonstrated the number one reason (most other) Americans find it difficult to deal with metric. They're obsessed with "what is that in inches?" It's as if their brains cease to function if you don't tell them what the measurement is in imperial. What you did is what they need to get off their collective duffs and do for themselves, and say "that" is 17mm. The first time I seriously had to use metric was my first semester of physics in college. Ever since then, metric has been easy. I used to come home every day from classes or work, and before turning the thermostat up (winter) or down (summer), I would estimate what the (C) temp was, then go over to a (digital) thermometer to see how good my estimate was. All it took was about 2 months' practice to be within a degree. That's all anyone who doesn't know metric needs to do, is to practice, but they refuse to do it.

Are there any consequences from using an unbalanced connection for that reference mic? Is there anything special I am missing in comparison to a less expensive, but still phenomenal mic like a Earthworks QTC40?

Does the uniformity of the response matter with sufficiently good DSP? Also, the size of the diaphragm and wavelength relatino sounds a lot like near field/far field in RF or photonics.

Lefty!! I've always wondered if there are more leftys that are into electronics than other fields.

Nice video! Could we also have at some point amp and speaker design?

Good video.

Can those laboratory microphones to be used for vocal recordings and podcasting?

Nice Nice Nice -Love this video ! Look at Daves face on 18:30 ! Marti Feldman from "Frankenstein" has lots to learn.

Dave looks so excited lol

Yay, audio engineering!

Thank you for another educating video

Fantastic! Did Doug work on the NT1?

Keep up the good work! Thanks!

This has been a really interesting series. I'm geeking out to listening to two guys talk about circuits and spit balling them on a whiteboard. I really have no life :-p However, on a more serious note, Advice please, (from anyone?) I have a vintage Kreisler Dynamic Microphone. it has a 30mm diaphragm connected to a transformer with three wires, and a 4700 pF (10% 400V - 039H) Electrolytic??? Capacitor (its shaped like a big resistor with a wire coming out of each sausage end.) Now, It stunk of old age so I had to dump the rotten foam padding that was in it, now it doesn't stink. but it does have noticeable, "Self-noise." Is it possible to refurbish this mic and reduce the self-noise, and how would I go about it? change the Capacitor? Add in additional circuitry? Throw the bloody thing away? (Kidding!) ... Advice please?

Thanks you. This is great.

What's up with the vignetting at ~25 minutes? Zoomed out on the macro lens?

Haha, audiofools! I'm going to start using that.

AWESOME! want MOAR!

Slams imperial and then pulls out favourite half inch mic :)

You missed out the fastest-growing type of microphone in use today in portable electronic devices and likely in future wearable electronics, MEMS microphones. see - www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1321756 and - www.digitimes.com/news/a20140410VL200.html