Microphones

A microphone, sometimes referred to as a mike or mic (both IPA pronunciation: ), is an acoustic to electric transducer that converts sound into an electrical signal. more...

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Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, tape recorders, hearing aids, motion picture production, live and recorded audio engineering, in radio and television broadcasting and in computers for recording voice, VoIP and numerous other computer applications.

Invention

The word "microphone" (Greek mikros "small" and phone "voice" or "sound") originally referred to a mechanical hearing aid for small sounds.

The invention of a practical microphone was crucial to the early development of the telephone system. Several early inventors built primitive microphones (then called transmitters) prior to Alexander Bell, but the first commercially practical microphone was the carbon microphone conceived in October, 1876 by Thomas Edison. Many early developments in microphone design took place at Bell Laboratories. See also Timeline of the telephone. The main basic designs still popular are of American, British or Russian origin.

Principle of operation

A microphone is a device made to capture waves in air, water or hard material and translate it to an electrical signal. The most common method is via a thin membrane producing some proportional electrical signal. Most microphones in use today for audio use electromagnetic generation (dynamic microphones), capacitance change (condenser microphones) or piezoelectric generation to produce the signal from mechanical vibration.

Microphone varieties

Condenser or capacitor microphones

Technology

In a condenser microphone, also known as a capacitor microphone, the diaphragm acts as one plate of a capacitor, and the vibrations produce changes in the distance between the plates. Since the plates are biased with a fixed charge (Q), the voltage maintained across the capacitor plates changes with the vibrations in the air, according to the capacitance equation:

where Q = charge in coulombs, C = capacitance in farads and V = potential difference in volts. The capacitance of the plates is inversely proportional to the distance between them for a parallel-plate capacitor. (See capacitance for details.)

It should be noted that the charge across the capacitor is not maintained perfectly constant. As the capacitance changes, the charge across the capacitor changes to make the voltage drop across the capacitor equal to the bias voltage. However, the rate of this change is kept slow by using a series resistor of a very high value (of the order of 10 MΩ). Note that the time constant of a RC circuit equals the product of the resistance and capacitance.

Read more at Wikipedia.org