Condensers or Capacitors

R

rob aylestone

Moderator
I guess over the years we had hundreds of changes in language and loads in the realm of music technology, but reading this month's Sound on Sound, I spotted a running theme - 'Condenser' has gone and 'Capacitor' has replaced it. The review of the Earthworks DM6, for example - Capacitor Microphone in the heading. Only one 'capacitor' in the text. Something made me think that the author had been instructed to not say condenser, but wasn't quite comfy with 'capacitor', so his text was sort of written to avoid the usual phrases. Usually, all mic reviews just user the term 'condenser' to handily describe sounds, or size or other stuff, compared to a 'dynamic' - but this seemed written by the careful brigade - in fact in the body text there is one capacitor and one dynamic mentioned.

Then a review of a mic modelling microphone, that manages the entire thing without using the C word once! It mentions dynamic mics, and the text is super heavy in classic condenser mic models, but the word has been sort of rubbed out? Moving on to a KM84 Neumann kit part mic - capacitor gets a few mentions, but mostly when describing capacitors used as components inside - very strange.

A pre-amp has phantom power for capacitor mics.

Bizarrely, the sontronics Saturn 2 is a capacitor mic in that review. Odd, really, because on their web site they call it a condenser mic?

The entire magazine seems to have been through a spell checker. I hoped one 'condenser' would have snuck through, but no.

I've taken nearly 20 years to stop saying valve, and now use tube pretty universally, but I'm not sure I'll be giving up condenser as a term for a while. The trouble is it will now be an avoid word for me. I don't want to say capacitor, but I understand condenser will become wrong very quickly.
 
Funny how language can use two words to mean the same thing.

Are words made up of letters, or are letters made up of words?....
 
I'm a 'valve' and 'capacitor' person. 'Condenser' was before my time.
I won't call a 'valve' a 'tube', any more than I will call a 'railway station' a 'train station'.
 
You Brits.... it's alnost like you think you invented the English language!!!! :ROFLMAO:

Here is the US, it's a rarity to hear anyone say a capacitor mic, or a valve amp. It's a condenser mic and a tube amp. Capacitors are the little components on circuit boards, valves are what we use to turn things like water off and on.
 
Rich, that's me, but the only time I bought a capacitor mic was a rotten Eagle mic in, I think 1974-76, when we had our only hot summer of my life. It had capacitor microphone on the box. Since my first decent mic, it's been condensers. The new change is very sudden.
 
Dave was adamant that capacitor was the correct term and that condensor was wrong. Since I got involved in audio around the turn of the century, I have only ever known them as condensor mikes, and I will continuee to refer to them as such. Dave might be correct, but language isn't static, and evolves in a way that's determined by usage. That's why, for example, 'guys' is now a gender-neutral term when once it referred to men, or why I use 'mileage' to refer to the value of something, even though we use kilometres here and I'm not referriing to how many mile per gallon I get.
 
Interestingly enough, Neumann, who created that type of mic, calls it a condenser mic. Here's a brochure for the "Telefunken U-47M". They also call it a condenser and that would have been before the 1950s. It also mentions the "tube", so those terms have been in use for 75 years or more. Why change now?

teleU47info.jpg
 
rob aylestone said:
I guess over the years we had hundreds of changes in language and loads in the realm of music technology, but reading this month's Sound on Sound, I spotted a running theme - 'Condenser' has gone and 'Capacitor' has replaced it. The review of the Earthworks DM6, for example - Capacitor Microphone in the heading. Only one 'capacitor' in the text. Something made me think that the author had been instructed to not say condenser, but wasn't quite comfy with 'capacitor', so his text was sort of written to avoid the usual phrases. Usually, all mic reviews just user the term 'condenser' to handily describe sounds, or size or other stuff, compared to a 'dynamic' - but this seemed written by the careful brigade - in fact in the body text there is one capacitor and one dynamic mentioned.

Then a review of a mic modelling microphone, that manages the entire thing without using the C word once! It mentions dynamic mics, and the text is super heavy in classic condenser mic models, but the word has been sort of rubbed out? Moving on to a KM84 Neumann kit part mic - capacitor gets a few mentions, but mostly when describing capacitors used as components inside - very strange.

A pre-amp has phantom power for capacitor mics.

Bizarrely, the sontronics Saturn 2 is a capacitor mic in that review. Odd, really, because on their web site they call it a condenser mic?

The entire magazine seems to have been through a spell checker. I hoped one 'condenser' would have snuck through, but no.

I've taken nearly 20 years to stop saying valve, and now use tube pretty universally, but I'm not sure I'll be giving up condenser as a term for a while. The trouble is it will now be an avoid word for me. I don't want to say capacitor, but I understand condenser will become wrong very quickly.
Click to expand...
The word condenser usually referred to a power capacitor or a capacitor that is primarily charged. But in the instance of the microphone, it has to do with charging the diaphragm.
 
Us Brits have always called capacitors condensers for some strange reason and certainly in WW2, despite having capacitance, they were universally condensers - radios were full of them, in both US and UK products. Certainly the engineers I worked with who were older than me always called them condensers. By that time of course they were labelled as capacitors, but while component wise, I swapped to capacitor - mics remained condensers. In a mic of course, the actual mic capsule is a capacitor, and in charging the thing just polarises it.
 
bouldersoundguy said:
The little can that's bolted to the side of a distributor is a condenser. It minimizes arcing between the points. What do you mean "What are points?"
Click to expand...
To give you a serious answer, its the arc formed when mechanically switching. A suppression condenser, which that is the long name for it, is a constantly charged capacitor that lowers the potential voltage where the two points break contact.
 
So, conversely, why do we call dynamic mics "dynamic". If there ever was an elusive use of the term, this is it. Maybe better terms would be active and passive mics, like our guitar pickups. Or powered and unpowered. An SM57 doesn't need power to operate but the U87 does.

As for Tube vs Valve, the tube is a valve, but then again, so is a transistor. Rob, I suspect you were calling tubes valves long before the transistor was commonplace. :) Not calling you old or anything.... :)
 
I remember this explanation being back in the RCA days - and the article I read used the term to explain that it was dynamic, as in it moved, like a speaker cone. Presumably a condenser diaphragm doesn't move, enough? I think they were talking about general transducers where the movement of the coil through a magnetic field produced a voltage. This was what I understood to be the origin of the term, but it was back in the 80s I think when I read it.
 
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