microphone capsules

I’ve been hooking anything and everything up to the amp and seeing if it works as a microphone and mostly they do. This thing below confused me because I couldn’t get anything from it, but I had two so I took one apart.
planar ribbon
And after pulling it apart I realised it was a dynamic mic. The two outer discs are magnets and the inner diaphram has a coil on it so it therefore works just like a dynamic mic where the coil moves in the magnetic field and so a current is generated in the coil. Then I published this picture looking for more info, than I actually got, but I was told that it’s a planar ribbon mic. My God, I own a ribbon Mic.

And it makes sense as the coil is actually an aluminium foil ,whether cut or etched is beyond me, but it is a ribbon of sorts and it is suspended between two magnets and the one reference of any use, on the net, I could find of planar ribbon mcrophones stated that they are much sturdier than regular ribbon microphones.

So far several capsules I’d thought were carbon were actually dynamic and so I decided to hook a speaker up to the input of my amp and lo and behold even that transduced signal.

Now I’ve just gotta think up way to mount these things in various ways to make them interesting.
Very good article on microphones.

Actually, as well today, I fixed an Italian electric harmonium that I’d sold on Trade me to a Comedian…literally, the guy does an act using musical instruments, and as I was fixing it I realised how well thought out it’s construction was and I realised the uses I could put it to…deconstructed.
But it wasn’t mine anymore so, oh well. One of the reeds wasn’t vibrating and upon pulling it apart I could see that the reed wouldn’t go into it’s channel and was getting caught up on an edge so I had to remove the reed box and adjust it so it would fit properly. Trouble was that the keys had rods off the ends that had a foot of sorts on the end that covered the hole that entered the reed box and these feet lifted off the hole to sound the note but to remove the reed box and get acces to the individual reeds I had to lift the keys as a whole. It seemed that the Italians had nailed this key frame to the backing board and all I could do was slowly file off the nail heads and lift the whole assembly. Very tiresome…. until I realised that the knob on the end of the harmonium body was an axle that could be pulled out and would allow all the keys to be removed. Good golly, I could have kicked myself at my own stupidity if I wasn’t so pleased with these Italians cleverness that was resolved down to absolute simplicity. It’s like that sometimes when incredibly well engineered stuff is not supposed to be that simple or ones own version of stupid simple takes precedence over divinely simple so one misses the obvious. Anyways after that it was plain sailing removing the reed box and tweaking the riveted reed so that it didn’t hit its channel edges and swung easily in and out. Engineering at it’s best is simple and things can be fixed, as opposed to removeable, but still be tweaked.
Italian electric harmonium
It’s actually got me thinking about the real fair dinkum indian harmonium, actually Pakistani as its made in Dhaka, that I’ve got for sale on trade me. It’s got to be full of reeds and stops and that that kinda stuff but then again I’ve got the monster harmonium out in the garage and once I get a little space I’ll take all my reed fantasies out on that… or be old enough then to just refurbish it and keep it in all it’s glory, Yessiree!

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