Royer Labs R-Series Ribbon Transducer Explained 

Nice to meet another ribbon freak 👏🏻

You're very welcome!

@@royerlabs It was an excellent video. Would love to see one detailing the difference between high-end and budget ribbon mics.

You're welcome!

🙌 We try!

You're welcome!

The spacing on the corrugations has virtually no effect on phase because the spacing is so close. We have experimented with non-corrugated ribbons and they do not perform as well as a corrugated ribbon because they lack elasticity.

@@royerlabs oh cool thanks a lot for the answer! I found out the beyerdynamic m160 has only a a few waves and then a big part that is not corregated and i really wanna find out why... love ribbons so much and i experiment around myself but some things are not measurable for me. And there is another experiment i want to do myself. I got that idea from motorbike suspensions and that is progressive corregating. So the corregations on the ankerpoint are bigger and get smaller to the middle. That means it stays responsive but is stiffer when it gets stretched. Sorry for all the unneccessary information i just love your ribbon mics and experimenting ^^

Wow !!! Incredible video, thanks so much for sharing. : ) Some of us love to know why and how. This video is like “Crack”.

The purpose of the offset ribbon and wide flux gap is to make certain that as the ribbon is driven harder the ribbon remain in the most powerful area of magnetism. Regarding sound wave, rarely does audio content consist of sign waves, so thinking in those terms could be misleading. In practical terms, the front of the microphone is directed to the stronger acoustic source and the rear, which is out of phase, receives mostly ambience. We were very careful when we designed the offset ribbon technology and calculated the dampening screens size, and porous properties of the screen, as well as ribbon dimensions and flux gaps.

@@royerlabs This discussion reminds me of a question I've always had about ribbon transducers. I know back in the day, radio actors were placed on opposite sides of the mic for recording dialogue. Today, recording engineers place different sources on each side of the mic. Why doesn't the ribbon fight itself trying to pick-up sound pressure from both sides at the same time?

@@chansetwo If I understand your question correctly, the ribbon does 'fight itself' when multiple sounds hit at the same time. But so does everything... your ears, etc. Sounds are always combining and altering eachother... for example certain frequencies of sound are boosted or cut, depending on room dimensions, as the sound waves either add together or cancel eachother out. So it's not really the ribbon fighting with itself, but the two sounds on each side of the ribbon. Bose noise cancelling headphones would be another example. The dimensions of the magnets and steel frame affect this as well... the larger they are, the more high end roll off there is in the sounds... or rather, the roll off begins at a lower and lower frequency as size increases.

@@chansetwo that is interesting to think about; what comes to mind is that with two completely different sound sources on opposite sides of the mic the complexity of the timing of the sound waves and their differences, (that is how differently they hit the ribbon element in time, intensity and frequency compared to each other), those differences are so great that we probably don't perceive very much of the cancellation summing etc. effects that could occur if it was the same source reflecting off the room and back into the back of the mic (or even the single source being loud enough and close enough to the front to reach around to the back and create what I was speculating could be a natural form of gain reduction/compression, a discussion that I would like to see talked about. I see that as a very natural form of gain reduction or compression).

@@hxhdfjifzirstc894 looking at magnetic flux intensity is a subject too often ignored as to the sensitivity of the mic and damping effects not only in amplitude but also in frequency response and true sound reproduction

The folds give the foil structure. Being less than 10 microns, the ribbon has no strength. In other words, folds make the ribbon not tear in normal circumstances .

It would rip and flex

Royer wrote here on a different question: "We have experimented with non-corrugated ribbons and they do not perform as well as a corrugated ribbon because they lack elasticity."