Derivation of Microphone Directional Patterns

Abstract

With the exception of the ribbon microphone with its figure-8 pattern, the basic microphone designs discussed in the previous chapter were all essentially omnidirectional in their pickup pattern. Recording engineers have always desired a variety of pickup patterns in order to solve specific problems in the studio, and the 1930s saw considerable development of directional microphones. The early designs basically made use of dual elements in deriving these patterns. That is, they combined the output of an omnidirectional element and a figure-8, or bidirectional element, to derive a given directional pattern. Such designs as these were often bulky and did not maintain their desired directional patterns at the highest frequencies.