What is figure 8 ?

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willieshakeit

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I am brand new to the home studio thing. Is it possable to post a diagram of the figure 8 setup,or are there several methods. Your time will not be wasted.
 
Figure 8 is a polar pattern. There are generally 3 main patterns. Cardoid, Figure 8 and Omni. Cardoid mainly picks up sound from the front. Figure 8 from the front and back equally. Omni from all directions. Do a search on "Figure 8" and "Polar Pattern" and you should find tons of advice.
 
cool

now i kow what to do with this at 4050
 
gorbyrun said:
Figure 8 is a polar pattern. Figure 8 from the front and back equally.
It should also be noted that on the sides of the mic (the null points) there's extreme rejection.
 
If you want to know what a figure 8 pattern looks like, it's two perfect circles, one on top of the other. (The distance of the line from the center of the graph, in a particular direction, represents how strongly the mic picks up a sound coming from that direction).

If you're so inclined, you might want to think about what makes the pattern shaped the way it is. A ribbon mic is a "velocity" mic: it picks up a signal when the ribbon moves in response to being pushed by air. If you push the ribbon straight-on from either side, the whole push gets transferred to the ribbon. If you push the ribbon from the edge, it doesn't move at all. The amount of the push that gets transferred is the cosin of the angle off of straight ahead: make a polar plot of the cosin function, and you get a figure 8 (okay, actually you have to chart the absolute value, but that's a technical nicety).
 
sjjohnston

man, that was above my head. you would have to explaine it in layman's term for me.:confused:
 
read it again, and ignore the cosine part. it's not that hard.

think of a sheet of writing paper suspended from the top edge. Blow on it from the front or back, and the paper will react by bending or pulling away from your breath. Blow on it straight from the sides (on edge) and the paper will hardly react.

Now, if you were to do an experiment where you gradually moved all around the paper and wrote down the results of how far the paper moved at each one of your positions - then put the results on a graph, you would end up with something resembling a figure eight. The positions where you are blowing perpendicular to the sheet would make the paper move the most, 90 degrees to the side the least.

See, that wasn't so hard!
 
that's what i'm talking about

nice looking out.
 
some of the mic manufactures have good directions on reading polar pattern charts. I saw one that was real neat, but alas I can't remember where. Once you learn to read those (which is pretty simple) it clears up alot. Then you can see how different mic's react at different angles (at least as far as signal level goes)

Later

F.S.

PS I just took a course on figure 8 mic's from some of the fine people here. It was recent and should be easy to find.

Sh!t, there it is now

https://homerecording.com/bbs/showthread.php?s=&threadid=66642
 
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