A weird question on Ribbon Mics

mjr

mjr

ADD -- blessing and curse
I've been doing some reading on these, and I found something very interesting.

Can someone explain to me why you're not supposed to sing into them, because plosives might damage the ribbon, but you can use them on amplifiers?
 
Hi,
Plenty of people have used ribbon microphones for singing or close speech but they're usually very well protected by design.
If you look at some of the commonly used ribbon microphones, quite often they have very heavy metal grills with small air holes,
compared with your average capacitor/condenser mic which would have quite a comparatively open grill.

The reason they're considered more delicate is because the ribbon is a *very* thin metal strip - Imagine aluminium foil except it tears the instant you try to pick it up.
It's corrugated then fixed to the frame so a ribbon, in use side on, looks like a zig-zag shape.
It wouldn't take much of an air blast to damage the ribbon but it doesn't even need to be damaged,
it can just be 'stretched' enough that the tension is altered and the ribbon then sags.

Amplifiers and percussive instruments can be incredibly loud but I don't think they're likely to have the same kind of blast effect as a very hard P or B.
That's literally just like blowing on the ribbon.

Hope that helps.
 
The real killer are those idiots who puff into the grill to test a mic is on - and this really can destroy ribbons like Steenamaroo says. Banging them can dislodge the ribbon in the magnet gap too. You can kill them by dropping them. A pop shield does pretty well at removing the wind, but all the common ones have a filter of some kind between the outside and the ribbon - mesh, felt, fluffy stuff - all do the job. I'd not stick on inside a kick drum because that slam of air that comes out of the front hole can blow out a candle! Even loud voices struggle to do that unless you purse your lips and constrain the airstream into a little hole.
 
I'm mostly asking because I found an "active ribbon" mic in my price range, and I was thinking about getting it, mostly for "mid-side" recording.

I mean, I get that the ribbon is very thin. The one I'm looking at has a 2 micron ribbon.

So how are they supposed to be stored? The mics I have now I can just store in their boxes/bags. But I've heard storing a ribbon mic on its side can cause the ribbon to stretch.
 
The old advice was that worst was storing on front or back, best logically was on the side because that’s the most rigid, but facing forward, the in use orientation for speech around a table, was probably the norm. One old engineer at the BBC told be that storing on their back or front did cause the ribbon to sag a bit after a few years, but that didn’t actually change the sound very much. Sideways sag in some designs could let the ribbon touch the magnet formers as the gap is often very small. Storage in their boxes always means front or back. That works for mine.
 
I got some laughs on this site years ago where I showed my guitar cab mixing with a large condenser, a 57 and a ribbon. I had a vocal style pop filter in front of the ribbon and some thought it strange. The reason was the amp was cranked and the wind movement from the speaker could have damaged the ribbon.
 
witzendoz said:
I got some laughs on this site years ago where I showed my guitar cab mixing with a large condenser, a 57 and a ribbon. I had a vocal style pop filter in front of the ribbon and some thought it strange. The reason was the amp was cranked and the wind movement from the speaker could have damaged the ribbon.
Click to expand...
See, that's what I assumed. I assumed if a plosive could damage the ribbon, then the air moved by an amplifier could, too. That's why I was confused...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top